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F. J. Stimson (J. S. of Dale)

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JETHRO BACON, OF SANDWICH
MRS. KNOLLYS, AND OTHER STORIES
IN THE THREE ZONES

THE SENTIMENTAL CALENDAR
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THE LIGHT OF PROVENCE

MY STORY (THE REVOLUTION’AS TOLD
BY B. ARNOLD.)

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ARIEL

BY
JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY
BY
F. J. STIMSON (J. S. or Date)
Late United States Ambassador to Argentina

BOSTON AND NEW YORK \F |
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riversive Press Cambridge
1922

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CopyRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIPPEIE

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:

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO
Prefatory Essay

NE day last year, some three years

after his death at Palermo alone and
in distress, a Uruguayan ship of war
brought home, to his native city of Monte-
video, Rodo’s body —to be buried. beneath
the great monument his nation is now to
dedicate to him. The day was made a na-
tional holiday, and all Latin America, in
sympathy, took part.

Although perhaps the greatest of mod-
ern American idealists, and the London
Times, the Boston Transcript, the New
York Prensa, devoted pages to his memory,
he is still little known in North America.
“*Arret,’’ perhaps his greatest work, has
much to say of us; it is charged with a
spirit that in these post-war days we have
largely lost; it brings the best thought of
that older, Latin, Roman culture of Amer-

vi JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

ica of the South to the newer, Saxon civili-
zation of the North; it has been therefore
a grateful task for a representative of the
latter to essay its translation, with a hope
of saving something of the beauty of the
original. For “‘ Arre.”’ is a thing of beauty,
first of all; its learning, if not its teaching,
might be gleaned from other books.
South America believes, with many of
us, that in the ideals of America rest the
hope of the world. And in this all-Amer-
_ ican mission, South America has its share.
_ The Saxon gift to the world’s civilization
was liberty ; the Roman, was law; the one
excels in applied science, the other in the
Art of Life; and both, in America, are
dreaming of a world where there is no
war. But South America, in an age of
brute conflict, a time of chemistry and of
machines, when the flood of materialism
seemed about to overcome the finer work
of civilization, has, by its very remoteness,
its very backwardness, been held aloof.

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO vii

Although with a passionate interest greater
then than ours, it viewed the war for the
most part asa distant planet a burning sun.
And before that cataclysm, to which the
world’s machine-made industrialism in-
deed had largely led, its countries, mainly
agricultural, were spared that flood of en-
ergy for the multiplication of the cheaper
things of life, not food for body or the soul,
that slavery to machines in the much-
vaunted ‘“‘efficiency,’’ and ‘“‘division of
labor,’’ that exploitationof manand woman
in the operative, which have so much con-
fused our Northern judgment of the higher
things in life, and, worse than that, has
_ bred class-conflict, distrust of all govern-
ment, and passionate enmity between those
who should be working together in gener-
ous production and fair distribution of even
the material things of earth.

John Stuart Mill had a horrible phrase :
** Utilities, fixed and embodied in material
objects’’ ; and it has lately seemed, in that

_ viii JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

world of chemistry and machinery which
our modern life has evolved, as if only
those utilities which could be fixed and
embodied in material objects and multiplied
in great quantities for universal demand
were deemed of any value. Newspapers in-
stead of books, “‘ process’’ work for pic-
tures, “‘movies’’ for plays, casts for
sculpture, moulds of concrete for architec-
ture, and, worst of all, canned food or
cold-storage for fresh vegetables, meat, or
fish, and ready-bought ‘“‘delicatessen’”’
replacing the art of cooking; commercial
textbooks and state-schedules for the indi-
vidual teacher; trusts for the private ini-
tiative; and everywhere, machinery for
handicraft, ‘‘ applied science’? for the arts,
and crowd-imitation or the mob-spirit for
the free mind. But Ruskin followed Mill;
and he asked humanity to consider what
‘value ’’ really means. It is not material,
still less mechanical, but the Afe-giving
quality of a thing: valor—valere —that

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO © ix

which is sane, and well, and makes for the
life of man; and that means, in last analy-
sis, the life of his soul. Moving men,
or their merchandise, or even their mes-
sages, at lightning speed from place to
place, does not better humanity nor much
improve man’s civilization; nor does the
multiplication of brute objects without
beauty or value in themselves. Value may
be defined as that which gives strength to
life and elevation to the soul. Beauty does
this; and purity of thought; and high
knowledge, both of past and present; and
these are works of art and of teaching,
not of science. And virtue, which is the
word value as applied to the spirit, is born
of thought and bred tocharacter. And the
great thoughts of men are saved for other
-men mainly by books. Thus we find that
it is art and literature which are true value
to the soul, as right acting and true think-
ing make the character of man. Science
should be the handmaiden of life, the

x JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

hewer of wood and the drawer of water;
the Caliban, in short. But the souls of
mien will starve as the ideals of men will
fail, when they forget their Ariel.

We live in a time when Caliban seems
to have the upper hand. The desires of
Caliban, the judgments of Caliban, the
hunger and thirst of Caliban, seem now
to fill the world. And some of us are los-
ing heart. We feel as if there were no
master Prospero, no mage to bind and
scourge Caliban back to his lair, to plague
him with the pains of his own shortcom-
ing, to punish his coarse body with cramps
and pains, the retribution, the Nemesis
that came in Shakespeare’s Tempest to
subdue even Caliban once more to his spirit
master. The voices that see this and pro-
test aloud are few. There were almost
none in Germany. The world of material-
ism was all that her misguided people saw.
Sometimes there did not seem to be many
in our own country, where the numbing

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO xi

stream of sudden wealth had lured man’s
coarser nature to self-indulgence, and a
luxury to which it was unused had stunted
—let us hope, but for the moment —the
growth of his soul.

Yet, living is an art, and not a science.
‘**Conduct is three-fourths of life’’; ‘and
conduct in itself is an art; the art of right
living. And valwe—that is, what makes
for the real welfare of humanity —depends
upon the wholesome things alone, beginning
with healthy food; for man’s first art was
the art of cooking; and ending in the art of
making a beautiful house, a happy home,
right teaching and right thinking for the
children; and the enlargement of man’s
nature in the higher freedom of the soul.

It seems to be a time when the multi-
tude is contemptuous of all this. Hod-
carriers are paid more than teachers ; while
as for thinkers, artists, poets, the world
now seems to have no use for them. For
five years it has devoted itself to the manu-

‘xii JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

facture of mechanisms to destroy human
life; only a tithe of its effort has been de-
voted even to the raising of food, to the
things that have value, that have the power
of giving life, life of the body or life of the
spirit. And yet men are puzzled! They
complain of the high cost of living, when
for a lustrum men have not thought of
living but of killing ; they marvel that those
things of real value, which the world has
neglected to plant or rear, have grown so
scarce. And in North America we do not
yet seem to have profited by this lesson.
Caliban has there no word for Ariel, and
all that Ariel represents. They call him
scornfully the ‘“ highbrow ”’ ; thatis to say,
the man who has behind his forehead sight
and thought for things that lie above and
beyond immediate sensuous enjoyment.
Sadly significant is the use of this scorn-
ful piece of slang — ‘“‘ highbrow ’’ —for |
all that stands above what swine may tram-
ple with their feet.

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO xiii .

Yet there have been voices, and voices
since Ruskin, who have spoken in protest
of all this. In Italy, Ferrero; in Uruguay,
Rod6; Amado Nervo in Mexico; the poets
of Colombia, and poets and publicists in
Argentina. Why is it that so many of
these come from South America, and all
that I have mentioned are of Latin stock ?

South Americans have sometimes
thought themselves unfortunate that they
were so far removed from the great mate-
rial movements of the day ; that they spring
from an ancient Latin race, not of lusty
Northern blood, and that for three cen-
turies since they have kept mainly to them-
selves by preserving the Spanish traditions
of manners and of life. They have valued
personal dignity as they have valued
courtesy ; personal liberty as much as State
power; less interested in machinery than
in the art of life; they have placed “‘J/a
_ joie de vivre’’ above the making whole-

sale of ‘‘ utilities fixed and embodied in

xiv JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

material objects.’’ And possibly some of
them have repined that they were weak
countries, not strong materially, not bris-
tling with navies or great armies. They
have not seen — nor does the world yet see
—what a rare réle they have to play. Of
all the quarters of the world, this alone
has been able to keep tranquilly burning
the torch of civilization. Here they have
_ {had no dream of conquest, and no harsh
~\necessity of protecting themselves. The
war has been remote, even in those South
American countries which engaged in it;
and before the war the very fact that they
were not countries of great material pros-
perity other than that healthy well-being
which comes direct from the soil ; that they
were not dazzled by all the temptations of
exploiting the masses in hived industries
—enabled them to keep Caliban in his
place. It is not a trivial thing that of all
countries of the world the Latin-American
ones are those where poets are most nu-

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO xv

merous and all that poetry stands for is most
prized. It is not without significance that
South America alone is almost free, so far
as Americans are concerned, from the ‘‘I
Won’t Worker ’’ who would spoliate the
labor of others and do without all but the
grosser things of this world —and from
the legislative meddler and from the Bol-
shevik. For the same reason, International
Law, which is the shield of weak coun-
tries against the strong, has its natural
home in South America; and many of its
leading scholars live there. For if liberty
be the great gift to the world of the Saxon
civilizations, law is the lesson of the Latin.
And bound together and protected by bonds
of fraternity which shall forever guard
them against foreign aggression, they have
been able to keep this lamp burning un-
dimmed. ‘The spirit of Cervantes is still
with them, as in that wonderful chapter —
wherein he talks on war. Long may it be
before it is forgotten! The object of war

xvi JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

is peace, as the object of life is joy; and
joy cannot endure without the love of one’s
fellow-men.

This work of Rod6’s, when it first ap-
peared, some years since, lay in piles of
popular editions in every bookstall in
Buenos Aires and other South American
cities. One can hardly hope for such a
general reading here. But it is a typical.
message from South America; and, as
such, well worth our attention. Spanish
scholars will note that (in order to con-
form their way of writing to ours in Eng-
lish) I have a little simplified the style of
Rod6, particularly toward the end. Bar-
ring this, I hope that it is faithfully repro-
duced; and that in the process of trans-
lating, not all the beauty of the marvellous
Spanish has been lost.

What would Rodé have said, had he
lived to see our entrance in the great war
for world liberty? And how much would
he have altered or added to what he says

/ ‘JOSE ENRIQUE RODO © xvii

of the United States in Arrer? Much, by
very much. Indeed for several years be-
fore the war there had been noticeable a
marked change in the feelings of in-
telligent South Americans toward their
big brother, the erstwhile feared ‘‘ Colos-
sus of the North.’’ Although Manuel
Ugarte in South America, with Zimmer-
mann of the Berlin Foreign Office, tried
vainly to keep it alive in the interests of
Germany during the war, this distrust of
us had been rapidly disappearing. That
very spirit of ideality which Rod6 in this
book finds so largely lacking had shown
itself powerful enough to lead us, with
motives at least immediately unselfish, into
the greatest war of history. For years be-
fore, ever since the Spanish War, in fact
(which in its inception they had bitterly
disapproved), our course, as shown in
Cuba, in the Philippines, and, despite all
our provocation, as to Mexico; in Pres-
ident W ilson’s Mobile speech ; in the treaty

xviii JOSE ENRIQUE RODO © \

making amends to Colombia ; and finally
in the reasons given in his address to Con-
gress on declaring war—had met with
South American approval. They feared us
no longer. And when they read our reasons
then given for our entrance into the war,
what had been fear became enthusiasm.
In Argentina, where up to that time Eng-
lish and German influences, equally strong,
had about divided public sentiment, it be-
came, from fifty-fifty “*pro-aliado’’ quite
ninety per cent “‘ pro-Americano.’’ Argen-
tina refused to issue a decree of neutrality
as between the United States and Germany,
although one had been issued, in 1914, as
between Germany and the other powers;
and a great mass meeting was held in the
largest theater in Buenos Aires to encour-
age the Government to extend open hos-
pitality to Caperton’s fleet during the war,
at which our action was compared to the
great heroic epic of South America when,
a hundred years before, their great liber-

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO xix

ator, San Martin, had led an Argentine
army across the almost unknown Andes
to free Chile and Peru, and then, with the
help of Bolivar, all Spanish South Amer-
ica from the yoke of Spain. San Martin’s
rifles had been sent him in a Boston ship :
and the ladies of Mendoza had sold their
jewels to buy the metals of which to cast
his cannon. And in the city of Mendoza
there is to-day, on a foothill of the Andes,
perhaps the greatest of modern monu-
ments, to commemorate this event.

**You have,”’ said one orator of the
occasion, referring first to their ‘‘ Cabildo,”’
in Buenos Aires, their ‘‘ cradle of liberty,’’
and then to their Independence Hall, the
old house in the city of Tucuman where
their independence was formally declared,
“a third great and solemn monument. It
stands on the Hill of Glory, and looks |
Westward to the peaks of the Andes. It
bears thousands of figures in bronze and
others sculptured from the living rock;

xx JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

and they commemorate the devotion and
the abnegation of the Argentine people
and the valour of their march across the
Andes under San Martin’s leadership.
And now we judge your entrance into the
great war for the freedom of Europe’s peo-
ples as that great épopée of San Martin
guiding us Argentines across the snows
of the Andes to liberate the peoples of
America. North America is crossing the
Atlantic now, as South America crossed
the Andes then.”’

So the Argentine people; and the Ar-
gentine Government answered our note
declaring the war on Germany with a note
expressing sympathy with our reasons
given and recognizing the justice of our
cause.

And Uruguay?

Rodé did not live to see it; but when
our fleet came down, during the war, and
there was question whether it should be
permanently received or coldly restricted

JOSE ENRIQUE RODO xxi

to its twenty-four hours’ stay permitted a
belligerent by international law in a neu-
tral country, Uruguay, in a_ published
decree, refused to be neutral in a war
where America was fighting for liberty
and right. An original copy of this decree,
signed by the Uruguayan President and
Cabinet, was presented by him to the
translator. This is its translation:

Montevipeo, 18 of June of 1917

Considering that in divers communications the
Government of Uruguay has proclaimed the
principle of American solidarity as controlling
its international politics, meaning thereby that
any aggression on the rights of one American
country should be considered such by all and
provoke in all a uniform and common reaction;
and that, in the hope that an accord to that effect
might be realized among the nations of America
_ which would make possible the practical and effi-
cient realization of this ideal, thisGovernment has
adopted an attitude of expectancy as to its action,
although expressing its sympathy in each case
with such American countries as have been
obliged to abandon their neutrality;

xxii JOSE ENRIQUE RODO

- Considering that, even while such accord has
not been realized, Uruguay cannot, without go-
ing against her sentiments and her convictions,
treat like belligerents those American countries
which in defence of their rights now find them-
selves engaged in an intercontinental war;

Considering that this judgment meets with the
approval of the Honourable Senate;

The Presment of the Repusiic

in Council General of Ministers ~
Resolves:

First. To declare that no American country
which in defence of its rights finds itself in a state
of war with nations of other continents shall be
treated as a belligerent.

SeconD. To decree that no dispositions shall
be made contrary to this resolution.

Turrp. Be this communicated and published,
etc.

Such was the opinion of Rodé’s coun-
try in 1917. It is hardly likely that that
of Rod6 would have been otherwise.

Fiid.:S

Buenos Arrss, Apri/, 1921

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ARIEL

N that evening the venerable old

master whom we used to call Pros-
pero, after the wise sage of Shakespeare’s
“*Tempest,’’ was bidding good-bye to his
young scholars, met about him for the
last time after a long year of task work.

They had come to the lofty hall of
study, where a taste at once refined and
austere sought to do honour to the noble
presence of books, Prospero’s faithful com-
panions. But the leading note of the hall —
like a divinity, serene in its nimbus — was
a finely wrought bronze, representing Ariel
in ‘‘The Tempest.”’

It was the manner of the Master to sit
close by this bronze statue; and that was
why he was called by the name of the
magician who in the play is loved and
served by the spirit of fancy that the sculp-
tor had sought to embody.’

——F.

4 ARIEL

But perhaps, as well in the manner of
his teaching, or in his character, there
were a reason for the nickname, in pro-
founder sense. Ariel, genius of the Air,
represents, in the symbolism of Shake-
speare, the noble part—the spirit with
wings. . . . For Ariel embodies the mas-
ery of reason and of sentiment over the
aser impulses of unreason. Heis the gen-
rous zeal, the lofty and disinterested mo-
tive in action, the spirituality of civiliza-

tion, and the vivacity and grace of the —

intelligence ; — the ideal end to which
human selection aspires ; that superman
in whom has disappeared, under the per-
sistent chisel of life, the last stubborn trace
of the Caliban, symbol of sensuality and
stupidity.

The little statue, a real work of art,
reproduced the Spirit of the Air at the

moment where, freed by the magic of ©

Prospero, he is about to soar into the sky,
there to vanish in a lightning flash.

3) +

Fs pi aR Prem ype

ARIEL 5

With spread-out wings, in a loose and
floating garment which the caress of the
light upon the bronze damascened into gold,
his broad forehead lifted up, his lips just
opening with a tranquil smile, all of Ariel’s
attitude most admirably showed that gra-
cious moment just preceding flight; and,
with happy inspiration, the same art which
had given the image its sculptured limbs
had succeeded in preserving in his face
that look of the seraph and the lightness of
the ideal.

Prospero passed his hand, thoughtfully,
over the head of the little statue; then,
gathering a group of young men about him,
with a firm voice — the voice of the Master,
which, to pass its ideas’ and grave them
deeply in the minds of the disciples, can
employ either the clear penetration of a ray
of light or the sharp blow of a chisel on the
marble, the stroke of the painter’s brushon
canvas or the touch of the wave upon the
sands to be read in fossils by future genera-

6 ARIEL

tions of men — the Master, as his scholars —
waited with affectionate attention, began to
speak :

Near this statue where you have seen me
preside each day over our talks as friends
—talks which I hope have succeeded in
dispelling from the work of teaching any
touch of austerity —I have once more to
speak to you, that our parting hour may
be like the seal stamped upon our agree-
ment both in feeling and in ideas. So I in-
voke Ariel as my divinity, and I could
wish to-day for my lecture the most gentle
and persuasive force that ever it has had,
for I think that to speak to youth of noble
motives, of lofty ideas, whatever they are,

is as a kind of sacred oratory. I also think
_ that the spirit of youth is as a generous soil,
where the seed of an opportune word may
in a short time return the fruits of an im-
mortal harvest. I earnestly wish to cooperate
with you in a page of that programme

ARIEL 7

_ which, in preparing yourselves for the free
air of action, you have doubtless formed in
your inner thought for the end of your ef-
forts, the object to which each personality
shall devote his life. For that intimate, per-
sonal programme—which rarely is formu-
lated or written out, but more usually stays
within the breast until it is revealed in outer
action — fails never in the spirit of those
peoples or those persons who are something
above the rabble. If, with relation to indi-
vidual liberty, Goethe could say so pro-
foundly that only heis worthy of liberty and
life who can conquer it for himself eachday ;
with much more reason might I say that
the honour of every human generation re-
quires that it shall conquer for itself, by
the persevering activity of its own thinking,
by the effort of its own will, its faith in the
determined, the persistent manifestation of
the ideal, and the place of the ideal in the
evolution of all ideas. And in conquering
your own you should begin by recogniz-

8 ARIEL

ing as the first object of faith your own
selves. The youth which you love is a
power whose application you must work
yourselves, and a treasury for the use of
which yourselves are responsible. Prize
that treasure and that power ; see that the
lofty consciousness of its possession stay
radiant and effective in yourselves. I say
to you with Renan: ‘* Youth is the dis-
covery of that immense horizon which is
life.’’. And the discovery which reveals un-
known lands must be made complete with
the virile force which shall rule them. No
spectacle can be imagined more fit to cap-
tivate at once the interest of the thinker
and the enthusiasm of the artist, than that
which a human generation presents when
it goes to meet a future all vibrant with
the impatience of action, of lofty front,
with a smiling and high disdain for deceit,
the soul purified by sweet and distant
mirages which wake in it mysterious im-
pulses, like the visions of Cipango and

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Eldorado in the heroical chronicles of the
Conquistadores. |

From the rebirth of human hopes; from
the promises which ever trust to the future
for the reality of a better thing, the soul
acquires that beauty which opens at the
breath of life; soft and unspeakable beauty,
made up, as the dawn was for the poet of
the “* Contemplations,’’ of “‘the trace of a
dream, and the beginning of a thought.”’

Humanity, renewing from generation
to generation its active hope and its anx-
ious belief in an ideal, across the hard ex-
perience of centuries, made Guyau think
of the obsession of that poor mad woman
whose strange and touching madness con-
sisted in thinking every day arrived the day
of her marriage. The toy of her dream,
every morning she bound to her pale fore-
head the nuptial crown and hung from
her head the nuptial veil. With a sweet
smile she then prepared to receive an im-
aginary bridegroom, all through the day to

10 ARIEL

the shadows of the night, which put an —
end to the vain hope, and brought again
disillusion to the heart. Then first her
madness took a tint of melancholy; but —
her ingenuous trust reappeared with each
aurora, and with no memory of the dis- —
enchantment of the evening, murmuring,
‘It’s to-day that he comes,”’ she turned
again to bind herself with the nuptial veil
and crown, smiling once more with the
hope of the promised one.

It is thus, not as with the loss of an
ideal that has died, that humanity clothes
itself each era with its nuptial dress and —
expects with renewed faith the realization
of the dreamed ideal—a persistent but —
touching folly. And to provoke this re-—
newal, unalterable as the rhythm of nature,
has been in all times the function and the |
work of youth. Of the souls of each hu- —
man springtime is woven that bridal dress .
for mankind ; and when one tries to sup- —
press that sublime stubbornness of hope .

’

ARIEL’ 11

which is born all winged from the very
breast of delusion, all pessimisms are in
vain, as well those which are based on
reason as those which come from experi-
ence. They have to confess themselves
powerless to contravene that lofty guand
meme which springs from the depth of hu-
man life. There are times in which, by
an apparent alteration of the triumphal
rhythm, human history crosses genera-
tions destined to personify from the very
cradle vacillation and disillusion. But these
times pass—not perhaps without having
had their own ideallike the others, though in
negative form and of unconscious loye—
and again is lit up in the spirit of mankind
the hope of the long-desired bridegroom ;
him whose image, sweet and radiant as in
the ivory verses of the mystics, suffices to
maintain the interest and content of life,

although never to be incarnated in reality.
- Youth, which thus signifies, in the soul
of individuals and of generations, light,

12 ARIEL

love, energy, exists and with the same
meaning in the evolutionary processes of
societies. Among these peoples who feel —
and look on life as you do, fecundity and
force will always be the dominion of the
future. Now there was an age when the
attributes of man’s youth made themselves —
more than in any other age the attributes
of the whole people, the marks of an entire
civilization, and in which a breath of
youth’s enchantment passed softly and
touched the serene front of a whole race.
When Greece was born, the gods awarded
her the secret of youth inextinguishable;
Greece is the soul when young. ‘*‘ He who
in Delphi contemplates the pointed masses
of the pines’’—says one of the Homeric
hymns—‘“‘imagines to himself that they
must never grow old.’’ Greece did mighty
things because it had of youth the gaiety
which is the atmosphere of action, and —
the enthusiasm which is the omnipotent
lever. The Egyptian priest with whom —

ARIEL 13

- Solon spoke in the temple of Sais, said tothe
Athenian legislator, pitying the Greeks for
their exuberant volubility: ‘‘ You are only
children.’? And Michelet has compared
the activity of the Greek soul to a happy
game, about which are grouped smiling
all other nations on the earth. But of that
divine game of children on the beaches of
the Archipelago and in the shadow of the
olives of Ionia, were born art, and philos-
ophy, and free thought, and the curiosity
of all investigation, and the consciousness
of human dignity—all those God-given
spurs which are yet our only inspiration
and our pride. Absorbed in its hieratic
austerity the country of the Egyptian priest
represented only old age, old age given but
to introspection, as if to practise for the
repose of eternity, and waving aside any
frivolous dream as with disdainful finger.
Grace, inquietude, are proscribed from the
attitudes of its soul, as was all action from
its images of life. And when posterity

14 ARIEL

turns its gaze upon Egypt, it meets only
the sterile notion of order regulating the
growth of a civilization which lived but
to weave itself a shroud and build its tombs;
the shadow of a sundial reaching out far
over the sands of the desert.

The gifts of the youthful spirit —en-
thusiasm and hope—correspond in the
harmonies of history and natural history
to movement and to light. Wherever you
shall turn your eyes you will find these,
the natural atmosphere in which move all

_ your eyes to the example most lofty of all,
~ _the idea of Christianity, over which even
~ has weighed some accusation of having
saddened the earth by proscribing the
gaiety of paganism. Christianity itself is
essentially an inspiration of youth, or was
before it wandered from its cradle. New-
born Christianity was in the interpretation
of Renan—which I hold only the more
true that it is the more poetic —a picture of

ARIEL 15

_ youth unsullied. Of the youth of the soul,
or, as is the same thing, of a living dream
of grace and purity, is made that divine
fragrance which floats over the slow jour-
neyings of the Master across the fields of
Galilee; over his sermons, which are de-
veloped, free of any penitent sadness, near
by a lovely lake, in valleys full of fruit;
heard by the birds of heaven and the “‘lilies
of the field,’? which thus adorn his par-
ables; preaching the happiness of the
**Kingdom of God’’ toa sweetly smiling
nature. From that happy picture are far
absent the ascetics who accompanied in
his solitude the penitences of John the
Baptist. When Jesus speaks of those who
follow him, he compares them to the
guests and bridesmaids of a wedding.
And that is the impression, one still of
divine contentment, which, embodied in
the essence of the new faith, one feels per-
sist through all the Odyssey of the evan-
gelists; which sheds a radiant joy about

16 ARIEL

the spirit of the first Christian communities,
an ingenuous joy of living, and which,
going to Rome, opened easy passage to
the hearts of the ignorant proselytes of the
Transtevere. It triumphed by opposing the
enchantment of the youth within them —
embalsamed, as it were, by the libation of —
a new wine—to the severity of the Stoics
and the decrepitude of the people of the
Roman world.

Therefore, be ye conscious possessors
of the blessed power you contain within
yourselves. But do you never forget that
this power is no more exempt than other
virtuous impulses from weakening and —
disappearing if it be not carried into action.
The gift of the precious treasure is from
Nature; but on your own ideas depend
whether it be fruitful or be vainly wasted,
so scattered and dispersed among individ-
ual consciousnesses as never to appear a
beneficent force on the life of human so-
cieties in general.

ARIEL 17

A profound critic has recently called
attention in the pages of a novel—that
immense surface mirror which seems to
reflect the only image of our life these last
hundred dizzy years—to the difference
that exists between the soul of youth as
portrayed in the time of ‘‘ René”? of Cha-
teaubriand and the modern French novel.
His analysis found a progressive diminu- ©
tion of ‘internal youth’’ and energy, be-
tween the heroes of romanticism and the
enervated in heart and will, as shown in
**A Rebours,”’ or ‘‘ Le Disciple.’’ Yet a
slight renascence of animation he hope-.
fully noted in some more recent novels
still, as in those of Lemaitre, Wizewa,
Rod, or even in ‘‘ David Grieve,’’ which
shows in the title character all the troubles
and unquiet ideals of several generations,
only to resolve them at last in the supreme
disentanglement of a happy love.

Shall this hope in truth be fulfilled?
You, who like workmen to the factory are

18 ARIEL

about to pass under the portals of the
twentieth century—shall you shed over
the arts ‘you study images brighter and
more glorious than were left by us who
are about to leave you? If that divine age
when youthful minds gave model to the
dialogues of Plato were only possible in
the short springtime of the world; if it is
the rule ‘‘ not to think on the Gods,”’’ as
Forquias instructs the choir of captives in
the second part of “‘Faust’’—may we
not at least dream of the coming of a hu-
man generation which shall return to life
a sense of the ideal; a grand enthusiasm,
when feeling may become a power, and
when a vigorous rebirth of will-energy may
expel from the bottom of our souls with
shouts of victory those moral cowardices
which are nurtured in our breasts by dis-
appointment and by doubt? Shall again
be youth the reality of our collective life,
as it is that of the individuals ?

That is the question which troubles me

She. «

ARIEL 19

as I look upon you. Your first pages as I
read them, yourconfessions in them of your
private life so far, speak often of indeci-
sion, of astonishment, but never of enerva-
tion or of definite loss of will. I am sure
that enthusiasm is still a living force with
you. I know well that those notes of dis-
couragement and pain which the absolute
sincerity of your thought—a virtue even
greater than hope itself —has caused to
spring from the tortures of your medita-
tion in your sad but inevitable meetings
with Doubt, were not an indication of
a permanent soul-condition; and did not
signify in any case your want of confi-
dence in the eternal virtue-force of life.
But when the cry of anguish rose to your
lips from the depths of your hearts, you
did not suffocate it before utterance, like
the austere and proudly silent Stoic in his
punishment, but ended your cry with an’
invocation to that ideal which “‘ shail
come’’—as with the note of a Messianic
inspiration.

20 ARIEL

On the other hand, though I speak to
| you of hope and enthusiasm as high and
fertile virtues, I would by no means cross
that inviolable line which divides scepti-
cism from belief, illusion from happiness.

Nothing is farther from my thought than
to confound with the natural gifts of youth,

with its beautiful spontaneity of spirit, that
indolent frivolity of thinking, which, as it
is incapable of seeing more than a gam-
bler’s motive in any human _ action, buys
love, or tries to, buys life’s pleasures at
the cost of ignorance of all those things
that may give one pause before the mysteri-
ous front, the solemn face of all realities.
That is not the noble meaning of youth
individual, or of the youth of peoples. I
have always thought vain the policy of
those statesmen, who shape America’s poli-
cies and guard her fate, to suppress, be-
fore they ever reach our shores, any sound
or echo of human suffering from the older
world or its literature—fearing lest, mor-

ARIEL. al

bid or unhealthy, it put in peril our fragile
optimism. No firm training of the intel-
ligence can be based on simple-minded
isolation or on voluntary ignorance. Every
problem proposed to human thought by the
spirit of Doubt, every sincere reproach
which is fulminated against Nature or
against God himself from the breast of
disheartenment or sorrow, has a right to
reach our consciousness and there be con-
sidered and faced. The strength of our
heart must show itself in accepting the rid-
dle of the Sphinx; not in evading its awe-
some question.

Nor should you forget that even in bit-
terriess of thought, as in joy, there may
ever be a starting-point for action, often a
fertile suggestion. When grief unmans,
when it seems so irresistible as to prompt
the abdication of the power to will, the
philosophy which breeds such thoughts is
unworthy of youthful souls. Then may
the poet denounce “‘ the slack soldier who

22 ARIEL

fights beneath the flag of Death.’’ But
when there rises from the heart of sorrow
the manly wish for battle, for conquest or
reconquest of that boon which is denied
us, then it becomes a double spur to action,
most potent impulse to life. So Helvetius
thought the very loathing of one’s own lot
a high prerogative of man, if, instead of
dulling our sensibility in a slothful sub-
mission, it awaken it and become a spur
to action. In that sense it has been well
said that there are pessimisms which are
likeinverted optimism: far from supposing
the renouncement and condemnation of all
being, they teach, with their discontent of —
the actual, the necessity of its renewal.
That which humanity needs, to be saved —
from all pessimistic negation, is not so —
much a belief that all is well at present, as
the faith that it is possible through life’s
growth to arrive at a better state, hastened
and discovered by the actions of men.
Such faith in the future, belief in the eff

ARIEL 23

_ cacy of human energy, are the necessary
condition of all strong action and all fecund
thought. That is why I have wanted to
begin with praising the eternal value of
that faith which, being in youth a very
instinct, needs the teaching of no dogma.
For you all feel it stirring at the depths of
your being, and know it for the divine
suggestion of Nature itself.

Animated by this sentiment, enter you
on life, its deep horizons before you, with
the noble ambition of making your pres-
ence felt therein from the moment when
you confront it with the glance of a con-
quistador. Join to the spirit of youth the
initiative of the bold, the innovation of the
genius. Perhaps everywhere to-day the ac-
tion and the influence of youth is less effec-
tive in the march of human society than
it ought to be, and less intense. Gaston
Deschamps has noted it, in France, com-
menting on the tardy initiative of the
younger generation in public life or cul-

24 ARIEL

ture, and the scanty original thought
which they contribute to the beaten track
of the prevailing ideas. My impressions
of the present America, so far as I can
form a general opinion, despite the sad iso-
lation in which live its peoples, would per-
haps justify alike remark. And yet] seem
to see everywhere expressed a need for
some active revelation of new forces; and
I hold that America stands much in need
of her youth. Here is the reason for which
I speak to you. This is why I am so ex-
traordinarily concerned with the moral de-
velopment of your minds. The force of
your word and your example may come to
embody the living energies of the past in
the work of the future. I hold with Miche-
let that the right idea of education does
not include only the teaching to the minds
of the sons the experience of the fathers, —
but as well, and often more, the informing
of the fathers’ experience with the innovat-
ing inspiration of the sons.

ARIEL 25

Let us then discuss how you shall con-

sider the life that is awaiting you.
yy

The divergence of individual vocations
will impress divers directions upon your
activities and cause to predominate in each
one of you a disposition of mind predeter-
mined by a definite aptitude. Some will
be men of science, others of art, others
still, of action. But over all the inclinations
which may bind you severally to different
tasks and ways of life, you should guard
in your inner soul the consciousness of the
fundamental unity of our nature, which
demands that every human being be, above
and before all, the unspoiled patternofa man
in whom no noble faculty of the mind be
obliterated, and no lofty interest for all men
have lost its communicative virtue. Before
all modifications of profession and training
stands the fulfilment of the destiny com- —
mon to all rational beings. ‘‘ There is one ~

universal profession: — to bea man,’’ says

= _ ee

BS Pd cayso™ Oo De

26 ARIEL

Guyau. And Renan, remembering a propos
of unbalanced and imperfect civilizations,
that the end of the human creature cannot
be only either to know or to feel or to im-
agine, but to be entirely and really human,
_ defines the ideal of perfection to which h ch he
| should bend his energies, as the possibility
of offering i in the individual type an abbre-
viated picture of the whole race.

‘Try, then, to develop so far as possible)
_ not any single aspect, but the plenitude
of your being. Shrug not your shoulders —
before any noble and fecund manifestation
of human nature, under the pretext that —
your own individuality ties you of prefer- —
ence to a different one. Be attentive spec- —
tators where you may not beactors.' When —
that false and vulgarized idea of education, —
which thinks it subordinate wholly to util-
itarian ends, takes upon itself to mutilate
by such materialism the natural fulness
of our minds, and by a premature spe-
cialization to proscribe the teaching of

ARIEL 27

anything that is disinterested or ideal,
it fails to avoid the danger of training
for the future minds that have become
narrow, incapable of seeing more than —
the one aspect of a thing which imme-
diately touches them, separated as by a
frozen desert from other minds that in the
same society have chosen other aspects of
our life. The necessity of devoting ourselves
each one to some determined activity, some
special form of learning, surely need not
exclude the inclination to realize, for the
intimate harmony of our spirit, that des-
tiny which is common to all rational be-
ings. That special activity must be but
the basic note of that harmony. The fa-
mous line in which the slave of the old
play affirmed that nothing human was
strange to him, being human himself,
forms part of that cry of the heart which
is eternal in the human consciousness be-
cause its meaning is inexhaustible. Our
capacity to understand must only be lim-

28 ARIEL

ited by the impossibility of understanding

souls that are narrow. To be unable to
see more than one phase of nature, more
than one human interest or idea, is like
living in the shadow of a dream pierced
by a single ray of sunlight. ‘That intoler-
ance, that exclusiveness, which when born

of tyrannous absorption in some high en- —

thusiasm or flowing from some disinter-
ested ideal may merit justification or even
sympathy, becomes converted to the most

abominable of inferiorities when in the

circle of vulgar life it betrays the narrow-
ness of a mind incapacitated to reflect on
more than the partial appearances of things.

Unfortunately, in the very times when —

civilization reaches its highest level of

ture is the danger of this limitation of.

¥ minds most serious and its results most —
to be feared. For the law of evolution re-

quires, as it appears in societies as well as
individuals, an ever-increasing tendency

to > heterogeneity, w which as the general cul- —

pn —

ARIEL 29°

ture of society increases limits individual
activities more and more_and restricts the
ere ens tena. Benita
narrower specialty. \ An ough it bea
necessary condition of progress, this de-
velopment of the notion of specialization
brings with it_visible evils which not only
lower the horizon of the eye of thought,
thus distorting its image of the universe,
but come to injure also the spirit of hu-
man solidarity by the particularization of
individual habits and affections. / Auguste
Comte well noted this peril of advanced
civilizations. A high state of social per-
fection had for him serious inconvenience

in that it facilitated the appearance of nar-
row and bounded minds; of brains ‘‘very |
efficient under one aspect and monstrously’ Ne
inept under all others.’? The belittling of ©!“ 1~
the human brain by continual exercise of 2?“
one mode of activity iscompared by Comte |" "~
to the miserable lot of a labourer who by!”
the division of labour is condemned in a

30 ARIEL

factory to devote all the energies of his be-
ing to the invariable repetition of a single

mechanical detail. In each case the moral _

result is to inspire him with a disastrous —

indifference to the general interests of hu- —

manity. pAnd although this sort of human

automatism does not, says the positivist,

occur save under the extreme dispersive

influence of the principle of specialization,

its actual existence, already frequent, re-

quires that we should give serious con-
eration to its importance.

This dispersive influence injures the
beauty of our institutions no less than their
strength. The incomparable beauty of
Athens, the imperishable pattern left to
humanity of all that is admirable and en-
chanting by her divine hand, lies in that
that city of prodigies founded its idea of

life on the concert of all human faculties,

—— oe

“7 = ae

in the free and chartered liberty of all en- —
ergies capable of contributing to the glory —
or the power of mankind! For Athens ©

ARIEL 31

alone could exalt at once the feeling for
ideal with the real, reason with instinct,
the forces of the body with those of the
spirit. It chiselled clear the four sides to
the soul. Every free Athenian draws, as it
were, a circle about him to contain his ac-
tivities, a perfect circle in which no un-
ordered impulse shatters the graceful pro-
portion of the line. He is athlete and living
sculpture in the gymnasium, citizen on
the Pnyx, polemic and thinker in the por-
ticoes. He exerts his will in every virile
action and his thought in any fertile task.
Therefore averred Macaulay that a day
in the public life of Athens comprised a
more brilliant programme of instruction
than any we now plan in our modern cen-
tres of education. And from that one free
blooming of the fulness of our nature rose
the miracle of Greece—an inimitable, en-
chanting mingling of animation and seren-
ity, a springtime of the human spirit, a
smile of history. .

32 ARIEL

In our times the growing complexity of
our civilization would make unserious the -
thought of restoring this harmony, whichis —
only possible with elements of a gracious —
simplicity. But within that very complex-
ity of our culture, that progressive differ-
entiation of our characters, our aptitudes, —
our merits, which is the unavoidable con-—
sequence of a progress in social evolution,
it behooves us to preserve a reasonable —
share for all in certain basic ideas or feel-
ings which alone keep up the unity and
concert of human life—in certain interests
of the soul for which the dignity of the ra- _
tional being suffers no indifference in any —
of us) When the sense of material a

a _

and comfort dominates societies with the
energy now shown, the results of narrow —
minds and one-sided culture are especially
fatal to the growth of purely ideal occupa-
tions. From being an object of love to —
those who nobly and perseveringly cherish.
them, they change to an unknown land, —

EE ae

ARIEL 33

- an unexplored region, whose very exist-

ence is unsuspected by an immense mul-
titude of the others. Any sort of disinter-
ested thought, of ideal contemplation, of
inward truce, to which the daily newspaper
yields for a moment its dominion, for one
glance that is noble and calm direct from
the heights of reason to things as they
are, will thus remain, in the actual state
of our society, unknown to millions of
minds, minds ‘‘educated’’ and “‘ civil-
ized,’’ who are by our education and cus-
toms reduced to the automatism of an
activity that is definitively material. And
more: that kind of servitude should be
held by us the very saddest and lowest of
all the moral conditions we condemn. And

| I demand of you that in the battle of life

you defend your souls against that mutila-
tion of them by the tyranny of a single
and self-interested object. Never give, to

either passion or self-interest, but a small

part of what is you. For even in material

34 ARIEL

servitude there is a way to keep free one’s
inner self, the self of reason and of ee
So r do you try to justify, b

absorption in labour, in conflict, nol en-

_slaving of your soul

I find in a corner of my memory a story |

which shall symbolize my meaning... .
There was a patriarch king, in some far-

off Orient where the flock of happy stories —
has its eyrie; he reigned in a kingdom of —

that happy candour one finds in Eastern

tale; he was called, in man’s tradition,
the king that was hospitable; immense —

was his charity. Within its bosom all

human misadventure came to end. To it ©
came he who needed bread and he who ©

wanted balsam for a wounded heart. His
own reflected, like a sensitive chord, the
rhythm of others. His palace was the
house of the people. All was liberty and
life within that august portal, which never

knew a guard; shepherds piped their
dances as they waited, old men gossiped —

NY a dn

|

ARIEL 35

while the evening fell, and changing com-
panies of girls replaced the garlands and
urns of flowers, flowers which were the
only taxes. Merchants of Ophir, traders
from Damascus, kept passing through the
open gates, competing in showing of rich
wares, silks, jewels, perfumes. Before the
king’s very throne reposed the wearied
pilgrim ; songbirds attended on his table
to pick up crumbs, and at the dawn came
_ little children to tell the king the day had
come; as well to souls without fortune as
‘to creatures without soul went out his
almsgiving. Nature herself seemed at-
tracted by his largess—the winds, the
birds, the very plants, seemed, as in the
myth of Orpheus or the legend of Assisi,
to seek man’s companionship in that oasis
of peace. Flowers bloomed unhindered
and unplucked in the very paving-stones,
twining plants sought the king’s own
chamber through the open windows; the
tired winds laid freely all their scents and

36 ARIEL

~

spices o’er his castle; the very spume of :
the sea sought to besprinkle its feet; and —
the freedom of Paradise, a mighty sharing —
of trust, kept up about its walls continual
holy day. .

But dilate fak within, isolated from
the noisy castle by covered passageways, —
hidden from the vulgar eye like the lost —
chapel of Uhland in the heart of the for-—
est, at the end of unknown pathways,
there was a hall of mystery, a home where -
no one ventured to set foot save only t e
king himself, where even his hospitality
seemed changed toan ascetic egoism. Not —
an echo of that external gaiety, not anote
of all that nature-concert, nota word from —
the lips of men e’er ventured past the —
thickness of those porphyrine sills to move __
an air within that forbidden hold. A reli- —
gious silence brooded on the chastity of —
its sleeping air; the light itself gleamed —
pale through painted glass, measured into —
tint, to fall like a cup of snow in a warm

i

|

;

ARIEL. 37

nest, in heavenly calm. Sometimes, when
the night was clear and still, opening apart
as a shell of pearl, one might see a vision
of the serene shadow. The perfume that
prevailed was that of nenuphar, pure
essence suggestive but of serenity and
thought. Grave caryatides alone guarded
the marble doors, in tranquil pose, the
faces sculptured into profiles grave in in-
trospection. And the old king would as-
sure his people that though no one of
them might accompany him there, his
hospitality prevailed there just as gener-
ous, as great, in that mysterious retreat
as ever; only that his guests there bidden
were invisible, impalpable. There he
dreamed, there he freed himself of the
actual, this legendary king; there he
turned his vision inward, smoothed and
refined his thought in meditation like the
pebbles all polished by the wave; there
he bound to the noble forehead the youth-
ful wings of Psyche. . . . And then, at last,

38 ' ARTEL

when Death came to remind him that he
himself had been but a guest in that palace,
the impenetrable house was locked and
mute forever ; forever sunken into infinite
repose. No one e’er profaned it, no one
e’er dared to set irreverent foot within,
where the old king had willed to be alone
with his dreams, in the solitude of that
Thule of his soul. .
(T o this story I liken your inmost king- —
dom. Open with healthy generosity to all —
the currents of the world, there exists at —
the same time, like the secret chamber o
that king, an inner forum hidden from all,
closed to the common guests, ruled by
serene reason alone.
within this inviolable sanctuary may you —
call yourselves free men. They are not
free who give up their_self-dominion to

ee ee

~~ \ jnordinate affection or selfish interest, for-

getting Montaigne’s wise precept that our
souls may indeed be lent, but-never-surs~
—rendered. To think, to dream, to admire

ARIEL 39

—these are the ministrants that haunt my
cell. The ancients ranked them under the
word otium, well-employed leisure, which
they deemed the highest use of a being

truly rational ; liberty of thought emanci-
pated of all ignoble chains. Such leisure
meant that use of time which they opposed
to mere economic activity as the expression
of a higher life. Their conception of the
dignity of life was linked closely to this
lofty conception of leisure; the classical
attitude finds its correction and its com-
plement in our modern belief in the dig-
nity of labour; and both employments of
one’s spirit shall make up a rhythm of
individual life whose necessary mainte-
nance needs no insistence on my part.) The
school of the Stoics which illummiéd the
sunset of antiquity as if with an anticipa-
tion of the dawn of Christianity, has left
to us a simple but touching image of the
salvation of one’s inner liberty even in the
midst of serfdom in that figure of Cleanto.

40 ARIEL

Compelled to use his brawny arms in sink- —
ing the stones of a fountain or moving a
mill wheel, he yet found time to devote : :
the breathing spells of his hard labour to |
tracing with roughened hand the maxims
of Zeno upon the stones. All rational edu-— 1
cation, all perfect cultivation, of our na- t
tures, will take as a starting-point this”
possibility of rousing in every one of us”
the double activity which Cleanto’s story
S lizes. if
“Once more; the basic principle of your —
development, your motto for life, should

in the integrity of your hu- |

can satisfy all reasonable objects of individ-
ual existence, as it cannot alone produce |
he ordered concert of collective existence. —
And like deformity or dwarfing to the body, -
is, to the soul, the result of an exclusive
object imposed on individual action and a
single manner of culture. The falsity of ©

+
—_—

ARIEL 41

what is artificial makes ephemeral the
glamour of those societies which have sac-
rificed the free development of their feeling
or thought, whether to mercantile activity
as in Pheenicia, to wars as in Sparta, to
mysticism as in the terror of the millen-
nium, or to the life of the salon and the
rt as in eighteenth century France. )
Keep yourselves clear of any mutilation
of your moral nature. Shape the harmoni-
ous growth of your spirit for every noble ©
way; remembering that the most easy,
usual mutilation is that which in human
life as it stands compels a man to forego
this sort of inner life; where all things
high and noble have their being, but, at the
harsh breath of reality, burn in the fires
of an impure passion or wither in the fur-
nace of utilitarianism: the life of which
disinterested meditation is part, and part
the thinking of ideals; that ancient otium,
the impenetrable chamber of my story !
And just as the first impulse of profana-

42 ARIEL

~~

tion will be directed to what is most sacred
in the sanctuary, so the common deteri-
oration I would warn you against will be-
gin by your despising what is beautiful.
Of all things of the spirit this sense is the
most delicate, clear vision of the loveliness —
of things ; and the one which most quickly -
withers in a life limited to the invariable
round of a vulgar circle, leaving it but a
treasured relic abandoned to the care of
the few. The emotion for beauty is to the
sentiment of other idealities as the jewel
to the ring. The effect of a rude touch is -
as a blow and soon works its fatal work ;
and an absolute indifference comes to be i in :
the average soul, where should be perfect
love. No stupor of a savage in the pres-
ence of the complicated machines of civil-_
ization is more intense than the dazed ;
wonder with which too many educated | |
men regard acts which show the intention —
or the habit of conceding a serious reality —
to what is beautiful in life. !

| ARIEL 43

as |

The argument of the traitor apostle be-
fore the jar of ointment, spilled to no prac-
tical purpose on the Saviour’s head, is
still one of the formule of common sense.
The superfluity of art is not, for the name-
less crowd, worth three hundred denarii.
If perchance they respect it, it is as an
esoteric cult. And yet of all the elements
of education that go to make upa full and
noble view of life, surely none more than
Art can justify our interest ; for none more
than it includes, as Schiller in eloquent
pages sang, a culture more extensive,
more complete, more fully lending itself _
_ to a concerted stimulus of all the soul’s
faculties. Even if the love and admiration
of beauty did not answer of themselves to
a lofty impulse in the rational being, had
not also worth enough to be cultivated for
themselves alone, it would be a motive
highly moral which proposed the culture
of the esthetic sentiment as a matter of
high interest for all. If to no one it is

44 ARIEL

fe -¥y Te = A meg

given to be without moral sentiment, its —
education carries with it the duty of pre-—
paring the mind for a clear vision also
of what is beautiful. Believe me, an edu-—
cated sense of what is beautiful is the _
most efficacious collaborator in the form-
ing of a delicate sense of justice. No bet-—
ter instrument exists to dignify, to ennoble
the mind. Never does a man more surely —
fulfil his duty than when he feels it, not~
as an imposition, but as part of a beauti-—
ful harmony. Never will he be a good
man more completely than when he knows |
how to respect in his own work the senti- i
ment of beauty i in the others.

Certain it is that the sanctity of good- :
ness purifies and exalts even things of
gross exterior. A man may doubtless real-
ize his work without giving it the out-
ward charm of beauty; charity, affection, —
can become sublime with means that are
common, unlovely, even coarse. But it is”
not only more beautiful, it is greater, that

ee,

ARIEL 45

charity which seeks to transmit itself in
shapes that are delicate and choice, for
then it adds another to its gifts, that sweet,
indescribable lovingness which nothing
can replace and which enhances the gift
with an added light.

To make men see the beautiful is a
work of mercy. Those who demand that
goodness, truth, should ever be shown in
forms that are gloomy and severe, seem
to me to be treasonable to truth and good-
ness. Virtue itself is an art, a sort of
art divine; smiling, as a mother, on the
Graces. The teacher who would fix in his
scholar’s mind the idea thatduty isthe most
earnest of realities, must at the same time
make him see that it is the highest poetry.
So Guyau, master of lovely comparisons,
uses an incomparable one here: that of
the sculptured saints in some Gothic choir,
each panel matched by one of flowers, so
that for every figure of a saint that shows
his piety or perchance his martyrdom, for

46 ARIEL

ie
each look divine, each attitude, there cor-
responds the corolla or the petal of some
flower ; to go with the symbolic representa-
tion of good deeds there blossoms, now a
lily, now a rose. So Guyau thinks o
souls should be sculptured; and was not
he himself, the gentle master, in the lovely |
evangel of beauty that his genius made, a
living example of that harmony?

to distinguish the delicate from the cot com=
mon, the ugly from the beautiful, has
gone half the way to .knowing the evil
from the good. It is true that mere good
taste is not, as the dilettante might wish,
the only criterion of human actions; yet
one should not, with the narrow ascetic,
consider it a lure to error, a deceitful
guide. We would not indicate it asa cer-
tain path to the right; but as a parallel
and near-by road which keeps near to it-
self the step and vision of the wayfarer.
In the measure that humanity progresses

ARIEL AT

it sees that the moral law is but beauty of
conduct; it shows evil and error like a dis-
cord; and will seek for the good as a re-
stored harmony. When the Stoic’s sever-
ity in Kant inspired the austere words
that ‘symbolized his ethics, “He dreamt
and thought that life was beauty, —he
woke and saw that life was duty,’’ he
was not mindful that, although duty may
be the supreme reality, in it may also lie
the vision of that dream; for conscious-
ness of one’s duty, with clear sight of the
right, may give it the glamour of beauty
too.

In the soul of the redeemer, missionary,
or lover of man, must also be required the
understandment of beauty ; there must col-
laborate with him some elements of the
artist’s genius. The part played in the
efficacy of moral revolutions by the gift
of seeing and making known the inner
beauty of ideas, is very great. Speaking
of the highest of all, it was Renan who

48 ARIEL | a
said, profoundly: ‘“‘The poetry of rh
lesson which makes it loved is more sig
nificant than the precept itself, abstract
taken. The originality of the work of Jes
lies not indeed in the literal acceptation
his doctrine—since that might be foun
entirely without leaving the teachings c
the Synagogue, searching for it from t
book of Deuteronomy to the Talmuc
but in having, by his preaching, made | fe
the poetry of his precept, that is, its inne
beauty. 3? ,

Dim will be the glory of those 2pc ye
or communions which despise the esthet
bearing of their life or teaching. T
Christian asceticism, which only kney
how to picture one face of the ideal, ex-
cluded from its concept of perfection 4
which makes life pleasant, refined, beau
tiful. Its narrow spirit brought it abot
that man’s untamable instinct for lib a

~ i

coming back in one of those irresistib
reactions of the human spirit, gave birt

ARIEL 49

in the Italy of the Renaissance, to a type
of civilization which considered moral
worth a delusion and put faith only in the
virtue of a strong or gracious exterior.
That Puritanism which persecuted all
beauty and all that is select or choice; that
shuddered at the chaste nudity of statues;
that made a very affectation of what is ugly
in its manners, in its dress, in its speech;
that sad sect, which, from the English
Parliament imposed its will to prohibit all
festivities that showed gaiety, and cut any
_ treethat bore flowers — tended, when joined
with virtue, to divorce virtue from all
thought of beauty. It was a shadow of
the tomb of which England -has not yet
entirely rid itself, which still lasts in the
_ least amiable manifestations of its customs
and its religion. Macaulay declared that
_he preferred the coarse “‘casket of lead ”’
inwhich the Puritans guarded their treas-
ure of liberty to the elegant box of carving
in which the court of Charles II stored its

Oe Lin Sr ore ae BO 8 RS ee SS ) Eee eS ems

50 ARIEL

refinements. But as neither liberty nor

virtue need be guarded in a casket of lead,

much more for the education of humanity —
than all Puritan asceticisms will remain —
the grace of the antique ideal, the har-—

monious teachings of Plato, and that |
movement, free and charming, with which —

#

Athens took and lifted to its lips the cups

of life.
The perfection of human morality woul
be to cast the spirit of charity in the moulds —

of Grecian elegance. And that sweet har-—
mony had once in the world a passing ©

born Christianity came to Greek colonies -
in Macedonia with Saint Paul; to Thes-
saly and Philippi the Evangel, still pure, ©
informed the soul of those refined and
spiritual communities, in whom the seal

.

of Hellenic culture maintained an enchant |

ing native distinction. One might have

hoped then that the two ideals most lofty —
that the world had known were going now

f
realization. It was when the word of new-

ARIEL 51

to be united for all time. In the epistolary
style of Saint Paul lingers a trace of that
moment when charity was being Hellen-
ized. But that sweet union did not last.
The harmony and serenity of the Pagan
conception of life was left each day more
distant by the new idea which was already
marching to the conquest of the world.
But to conceive of a way in which once
more a step in advance might be shown
for the moral perfectionment of humanity,
one would have to dream that the Christian
ideal again were reconciled with the serene
and luminous joy of ancient times, and
that again the Evangel was being spread
in Philippi and Thessaly.

To cultivate good taste should mean
not only to perfect the external form. of
culture, to develop an artistic attitude, and
with exquisite superfluity some elegance
of civilization. Good taste ‘‘ is the strong
check-rein of the critical judgment.’’
‘Martha was able to call it like a second

52 ARIEL

conscience, which sees us right and brings
us back to the light when the first grows —
obscure or hesitating ; and a delicate sense ;
of beauty is for Bagehot as a helpmate of
unerring tact in life and of perfect dignity
in manners. ‘‘The education of good —
taste,’’ said he, ‘‘favours the growth of
good sense, which is our necessary view- —
point for the complexities of civilized life. ;
If ever you see such education united in —
the mind of individuals or societies with {
any extravagance either of moral or of —
sentiment, it will be because in such cases _
it has been cultivated as an isolated, ex- ;
clusive quality, so rendering impossible —
the effect of moral perfectionment which it
might have brought about in a manner of
culture in which no faculty of the mind is —
developed out of relation to the others.’?
In a soul which has been the object of © ;
harmonious and perfect culture, the inner —
grace and fineness of the sentiment of the
beautiful will be the same thing with

ATER. My

ARIEL 53

strength and straightness of the reason.
Thus Taine points out that in the grand
works of ancient architecture, beauty is
but sensible manifestation of strength, and
elegance the outer appearance of solidity :
**The same lines of the Parthenon which
delight the view with harmonious propor-
tions, content the intelligence with their
promise of durability.’’ °
There is some organic relation, some
natural and close sympathy, which ‘con-
nects the perversions of the will and feel-
ing with the falsities and crudities of bad
taste. If it were given to us to penetrate
into the mysterious labyrinth of the soul,
to reconstruct the intimate story of souls
in the past, in order to discover the for-
mula of their definite moral natures, it
would be an interesting object of study to
determine what, in the ‘refined perversity
of a Nero, corresponds to the germ of a
monstrous histrionism left in the soul of
that sanguinary comedian by the affected

04 ARIEL

rhetoric of Seneca. And when one calls
to mind the oratory of the French Conven-
tion and detects a rhetorical perversion
everywhere apparent like the feline fur of
Jacobinism, it is impossible not to connect
like the radii that part from one centre,
like the signs of an identical insanity, the
extravagance of taste, the vertigo of all

moral sentiment, and the fanatical limita- __

tion of the reason.

Undoubtedly there is no more certain
result of the zsthetic sense than that which
teaches us to distinguish as relative the
good and the true and the beautiful, and
accept some possibility of beauty in evil

*

and error. Yet one need not neglect this —

truth, definitively true, by believing in
some sympathetic connection between all
these lofty objects of the soul and consid-
ering each one of them as but the starting-
point, not the only one, but still one,
whence it is possible to go to a meeting
with the others.

Te ah,

tahini.»

-_ SN ee

ARIEL 55

The notion, then, of a higher accord
between good taste and the moral sense is
therefore true, as well in the spirit of in-
dividuals as of societies. For what con-
cerns these last, that accord may have its
example in the relation affirmed by Rosen-
kranz to exist between liberty and the
moral order, on the one hand, and the
beauty of the human form which results
from the development of races, on the
other. That typical beauty reflects, for
the Hegelian thinker, the ennobling effect
of liberty; for slavery makes ugly at the
same time that it degrades, while the
consciousness of their harmonious devel-
opment impresses the outward seal of
beauty on races that are free. _

In the characters of peoples, the gifts
derived from fine taste, the mastery of
gracious form, the delicate power to inter-
est, the virtue of making ideas likeable,
go with the genius of propaganda—that
is to say, the mighty gift of universality.

56 ARIEL

Certain it is that to the possession of these —
chosen attributes may be referred the mean-_
ing of the word Auman, which the French —
spirit is quick to apply to all it chooses —
out and commends. Ideas grow strong —
and speedy wings, not in the cold bosom —
of abstractions, but in the warm and lu-—
minous air of actual shape. Their supe-
rior diffusion, their greater prevalence at
times, result because the Graces have
bathed them in their light. And just so, in-
the evolution of life itself, those enchant-—
ing outward signs of nature which in seem- |
ing represent only the gift of superfluous —

caprice— music, the painted plumage of

birds, the corolla of flowers, their perfume

—are as advertisement to the insect that

bears the fecund pollen. They have played,
amid the elements of the struggle for life,
a function of great realism, in that, show-—
ing a superior motive, a reason for prefer-
ence, to the love instinct, they have caused |
to survive in every species those beings |

paren

ARIEL 57

_ that are best endowed with beauty over
all the others.

For one who has instinctive love of
beauty, there is indeed a certain kind of
mortification in stooping to defend it by
arguments that are based on any other
reason or principle than that impossible
and disinterested love for it which satis-
fies a fundamental impulse of any rational
being. But unfortunately this motive has
lost its empire over a vast number of men,
to whom it is necessary to teach a due
respect for a love they do not share by
showing them what are the relations which
connect it with other classes of human in-
terest. And to do this one must often cope
with a vulgar view of such relations: that
anything that tends to soften the outlines
of the social character or customs and
sharpens the sense of beauty, to make of
taste a delicate sensibility of the soul and
of grace the universal form of action is (for
such critics, disciples of the harsh and

58 ARIEL

useful only) to depreciate all that is heroic,
virile in the temper of society, on the one
hand, and its positive utilitarian capacity

on theother. In ‘‘ The Toilers of the Sea’’
we read how the people of Jersey when

they first saw a steamboat anathematized
it on account of the tradition that fire and
water are hostile elements; the common
critique abounds with beliefs in similar

enmities. If you propose to make common ~

eet tae

Cet | Peete penl lee *

—

love of the beautiful, you must begin by ©

making men understand the possibility of
harmonic concert between all legitimate
human activities; and that will be an easier
task than to convert them straightway to —
a love of the beautiful, in itself. ‘To make

the mass of men unwilling to expel the
swallows from the home, one must, as

onary

2 mang DN natme a |

:

Pythagoras counselled, first convince them —

—not of the gracefulness of the bird or its
legendary virtue—but that its nests will in
no manner interfere with the durability of
the shingles or tiles where they build! .

f

q

iil ’

ARIEL 59

To that conception of human life which
is formed on the free and harmonious de-
velopment of our nature, and therefore
includes among its essential objects the
satisfaction of our feeling for the beautiful,

is opposed —as a rule for conduct
—the conception called, utilitarian; under
which our whole activiti verned

by their relation to the immediate ends of
self-interest. The blame of a narrow utili-
tarianism as the only monitor of the spirit
of our century, meted out to it in the name
of the ideal with all the rigours of Anath-
ema, is based in part in the failure to rec-
ognize that its Titanic efforts for the sub-
ordination of the forces of Nature to the
human will and for the extension of mate-
rial well-being are a necessary labour to
prepare, as by the laborious enrichment
of an exhausted soil, for the flowering of
future idealisms. The transitory predom-
inance of that function of utility which
has absorbed the agitated and feverish life

L435
hela

pten, ar®
Cif.

60 ARIEL

of the last hundred years with its most —
potent energies explains, however, al-
though it does not justify, many of the
painful yearnings, many discontents and
grievances of the intelligence, which show
themselves either by a melancholy and

exalted idealization of the past, or bya

cruel despair of the future. For this there
is one fruitful and well-adventured thought
in the proposition of a certain group of —

thinkers of these last generations, among

whom I need only cite again the noble
figure of Guyau, who have tried to seal
the definitive reconciliation of the con-
quests of the century with the renovation
of many old human devotions, and have

put into this blessed work as many treas-

ures of love as of genius.

l ( Often you will have heard attributed to

two main causes that torrent of the spirit —
of utility which gives its notetothe moral |
physiognomy of the present century, with

ARIEL 61

its neglect of the esthetic and disinter- |
ested view of life. The revelations of na-

tural science, whose interpreters, favour- |
able or the reverse, agree in destroying all -
ideality for its base, are one; the other is
the universal diffusion and triumph of
democratic ideas. I propose to speak to
you exclusively of this latter cause ; be-
cause I trust that your first initiation in
the revelations of Science has been so di-
rected as to preserve you from the danger
of a vulgar interpretation. Upon democ-
racy weighs the accusation of guidin
humanity, by making it mediocre, to a
Holy Empire of Utilitarianism. This ac-
cusation is reflected with vibrant intensity
in the pages—for me always full of a sug-
gestive charm —of the most amiable among
the masters of the Modern Spirit: the
seductive pages of Renan, to whose au-
thority you have often heard me refer and
of whom I may often speak again. Read
Renan, those of you who have not done

62 ARIEL

so already, and you will have to love him
as Ido. No one as he, among the mod-
erns, appears to me such a master ‘‘of
that art of teaching with Grace’’ which
Anatole France considers divine. No one
so well as he has succeeded in combining
irony with pity; even in the rigour of the
analysis he can put the unction of the
priest. And even when he teaches us to
doubt, his exquisite gentleness sheds a
balsam over the doubt itself. ) His thoughts
ring in our minds with echoes ineffable,
so vague as to remind one of sacred music.
His infinite comprehension makes critics
class him among those dilettantes of a light
scepticism who wear the gownof the phi- —
losopher like the domino of a mask ; but,
once you penetrate his spirit, you will see
that the vulgar tolerance of the mere sceptic

differs from his as the hospitality of a

worldly sa/on from the real spirit of charity.
This master holds, then, that high pre-

occupation with the ideal interests of our —

‘ARIEL 63

race_is irreconcilable with the spirit of —)
democracy. He believes that the concep-
‘tion oF He in a society where that spirit
dominates will gradually come to seek only
material welfare, as the good. most attain-
able for the greatest number. According
to him, democracy is the enthronement of
Caliban. Ariel can but be vanquished by
its triumph. Many others who most care |
for esthetic culture and select spirit are
of a like mind. Thus Bourget thinks that
universal triumph of democratic institu-
tions will make civilization lose in profun-
dity what it gains in extension. He sees its
necessary end in the empire of individual
mediocrity. “‘ Who says democracy voices
the evolution of individual tendencies and
the devolution of culture.’’ These judg-
ments have a lively interest for us Amer-
icans who love the cause and consequence
of that Revolution which in our America
is entwined with the glory of its origin,
and believe instinctively in the possibility

64 ARIEL

of a noble and rare individual life which
need never sacrifice its AS Genty to the ca-
prices of the rabble. (To confront the prob-
lem one must first recognize that'if democ-
racy do not uplift its spirit by a strong
A ideal interest which it shares with its pre-—

occupation by material interests, it does
lead, and fatally, to the favouring of medi- —
ocrity, and lacks, more than any other
social system, barriers within which it may
safely seek the higher culture. Abandoned
to itself, without the constant rectification
of some active moral sanction which shall
purify and guide its motives to the digni-
a fying of life—democracy will, gradually, |
extinguish the idea of any superiority

which mi may not be turned into a more effi-
cient training for the war of~interests. It
vim the auostigwsble Fame ok bru-
talities of power. Spiritual preference, ex-
altation of life by unselfish motive, good

taste and art and manners, and the ad-
miration of all that is worthy and of good

ARIEL 65

repute, will then alike vanish unprotected

when social equality has destroyed all
grades of excellence without replacing
them with others that shall also rule b

moral influence and the light of reason,

LAny equality of conditions in the erder
of S cee Ele himsngiesty incase ia
but_an_unstable equilibrium. From that
moment when democracy shall have worked

its perfect work of negation by the level-

ling of unjust superiorities, the equality
so won should be but a starting-point. Its
affirmation remains; and the afhirmation
of democracy and its glory consist in
arousing in itself by fit incentives the rev-
‘elation and the mastery of the true supe-
riorities of men.

ith relation to the conditions of the
life of America, that duty of attaining the
true conception of our social state is dou-
bly needful. Our democracies grow rap-
idly by the continual addition of a vast
cosmopolitan multitude, by a stream of

66 ARIEL

immigration which is merged with a nu-—
cleus. already too weak to make active
effort at assimilation and so contain the —
human flood by those dikes which ar
ancient solidity of social structure can
alone provide, a secured political order,
and the elements of a culture that has be
come deeply rooted. This rapid gro
exposes our future to the dangers of
democratic degeneration which smothers
under the blind force of the mass all idea
of quality, deprives the social conscious-
ness of all just notion of order, and, yield-
ing its class organization to the rough
hands of chance, causes the triumph of
only the most ignoble, unjustifiable su-
premacies. 4
It is, OF course, true that our selfish
advantage—not the virtue of it alone—
bids us be hospitable. Long since the need
of peopling the emptiness of the desert —
made a famous publicist coin the phrase,
**To govern is to populate.’’ But this fa-

ARIEL 67

mous aphorism contains a truth that must
not be closely interpreted; it must not
ascribe civilizing virtues to mere number.
To govern is to populate by assimilation
first of all, and then by education an
selection. If the appearance and growt
in a society of the highest human activi-
ties require a dense population, it is pre-
cisely because great numbers make pos-
sible the most complete division of

and the birth of elements of strong leader-
ship which bring about the predominance
of quality over quantity. The multitude,
the anonymous mass, is nothing by itself.
It will be an instrument of barbarity or of
civilization according as it has or lacks
the coefficient of high moral leadership.
There is deep truth in Emerson’s paradox
that every country on earth should be
judged by its minorities and not its ma-

jorities. ‘The civilization of _a_country’

ve

—_

acquires its grandeur, not by its manifesta-
. % « * . .
tions of.material prosperity and predomi- !

68 ARIEL

nance, but by the hi : ink
or of feeling Hake che tibiae |
Comte: it is senseless to pretend that ex-—
cellence can ever be replaced by number,
that by an accumulation of vulgar minds _
one may hit upon a brain of genius, or by ~
the addition of many mediocre virtues get —
the equivalent of a deed of heroism. So
our democracy, proclaiming the universal-
ity and equality of rights, will sanction
the ignoble predominance of mere number
unless it be careful highly to maintain the
idea of human superiorities that are legiti-
mate; and to make authority, bound to a
popular vote, not the exponent of an ab-
solute equality, but (as I remember some
young Frenchman said) “‘the consecration
of a hierarchy based on liberty.’’

The clash between the democratic rule, _
and the higher life becomes a fatal reality |
when that rule imparts the disregard of!
even legitimate superiorities and the sub- —
stitution of mechanical government fora _

ARIEL 69

faith in heroism (in Carlyle’s sense). All

in civilization that is more than material
excellence, economic prosperity, is a height
that will be levelled when moral authority
is given to the average mind.. Though
there be no longer external invading hordes
to hurl themselves upon the beacon lights
of civilization with a might now devastat-
ing and now regenerating, the high cul-
ture of to-day should guard itself against
the soft and gradual dissolvent work of
those other crowds, pacific, even educated
—the unescapable multitudes of the vul-
gar, whose Attila might well be personi-
fied in ‘‘ Mr. Homais,’’ whose heroism is
shrewdness, ordered by an instinctive re-
pugnance for what is great; whose device

_ is the leveller. Immovable indifference and

quantitative superiority are its attributes,
the usual result of its labours ; yet is it not
entirely incapable of rising to epic heights,
usually of anger, giving free reins to its
antipathies. Charles Morice calledit *‘ those

70 ARIEL

phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes who
have for their device Mediocrity, andmarch
together in their hatred of all that is extra-

ordinary.”’

gpa to power, these Prudhommes
will make of their triumphant will an-
organized hunting-party against all that
shows aptitude or daring wing to fly high
Its social formula will be a democracy
which leads to the consecration of Pope
Anyone, the coronation of King Average,
They will hate merit as a rebellion. In
their dominion all noble superiority wi
be like a marble statue placed in a mir
road to be spattered by the mud of any
passing waggo hey will call the dog-
matism of common sense, wisdom; mear
avidness of heart, gravity; adaptation tc
the mediocre, sound judgment; and bad
taste, manly indifference to trifles. Their
notion of justice will lead them either t
substitute in history the immortality of
great men by the common forgetfulnes:

ARIEL 71

of all, or to preserve it with the equal
memory of a Mithridates who knew the
names of all his soldiers. Its manner of
republicanism will resemble that of Fox,
who used to submit his projects to the
criterion of that member who seemed to
him the most perfect type of the country
zentleman, judging by the limitation of his
faculties and the rudeness of his gestures.
Then we shall be in that Zoédcracy that
Baudelaire imagined, and Shakespeare’s
Titania, kissing an ass’s head, will be the
smblem of that liberty which calls but for
the middling. Never could a tyrant’s con-
juest compass a more sinister end!

And if you make a prophet of your
aeighbour who preaches the belittling les-
n of the mediocre, if you make him
your hero and eek your salvation in his
yureaucratic content—you will encounter
at rancorous, implacable hostility against
ill that is beautiful, all that is dignified or
elicate in the spirit of humanity which,

72 ARIEL »

even more than its brutal shedding :
blood, is so repugnant in the Jacobi
tyranny. Before its tribunal the wisdo
of a Lavoisier, the genius of a Cheni
the dignity of a Malesherbes, become or
faults; amid the shouting of its Conve
tions we hear the cry, Distrust that mi
he has written a book! Confounding t
idea of democratic simplicity with Re
seau’s state of nature, it would take t
vignette of his first edition as symbolic’
the antinomy between democracy and ¢
ture, that famous diatribe against the a
and sciences in the name of morality
satyr, rudely seizing the torch of Prom
theus from his hands, only to learn th
its Ha flame is mortal to him who touches i

/Equalitarian 1 ferocity has not, indee
yet shown itself in the democratic de
opment of our century, nor opposed
brutal manner the serenity and liberty
our intellectual growth. But like sc
savage beast now domesticated, its la

ARIEL’ "73

progeny have changed their native ferocity
to an artful and ignoble tameness, equal-
itarianism; and this mild tendency to all
that is utilitarian or vulgar may fairly be
blamed upon the democracy of the nine-
teenth century.) No sensitive or sagacious
mind has ever studied this without anx-
iously considering some of its results in
their social and their political aspect.
Contemporary thought, while rejecting
that false conception of equality that made
the delirium of the French Revolution, has
yet maintained a severe scrutiny of the
very theory of democracy, which you, who
are about to create the future, must begin
with; not necessarily to upset, but to edu-
cate, the spirit of our time.

{ Since our century began to assume in-
dependence, personal liberty in the evolu-
tion of its ideas, German idealist philos-
-ophy has rectified the equalitarian Utopia
of the eighteenth century and again ex-
alted, albeit with too much Czsarism, the

74 ARIEL

part played in history by individual great
ness. Comte’s positivism, not recognizin;
in the democratic equality anything but;
transitory wiping out of ancient class sys
tems, and denying with equal conviction
the definitive efficiency of popular rule,
sought in the principles of natural classi-
fication a basis for that social classification
which should be the substitute for the
hierarchies recently destroyed. The crit
cism of the democratic régime took
severer form in the generation of Taine
and Renan: to this modern Athenian the
only equality which appealed was one like |
that of Athens, ‘‘ an equality of demigods.””
And as to Taine, he wrote ‘‘ the Origin ¢
contemporary France’’; and if, on th
one hand, his conception of society as
organism leads him logically to reject all)
idea of uniformity opposed to the prince
ples of dependent and subordinate organ-
isms, on the other his fine instinct for
intellectual selection leads him to abor

ARIEL 75

nate the invasion of the heights by the
multitude. Already the great voice of Car-

lyle had preached against irreverent-level-
ling, and for heroism; meaning by that

word any noble superiority ; and Emerson

Oe, —

echoed this idea in the bosom of the most
positivist of democracies. The new sci- |
ence spoke of natural selection as a neces-
sity of all progress ; and in art, where the
feeling for the exquisite has its most obvi-
ous application, those notes reverberated
which seek to express the feeling of what

we may call the estrangement of the spirit
to modern conditions of life. Nor to hear
them is it necessary to copy that Parnas-
sian spirit of a delicate and feeble stock
which an aristocratic disdain for the pres-
ent drives to reclusion in the past. Of the
constant inspirations of Flaubert — from
-whom springs directly the most democra-

tized of all the modern schools —none is

/ more intense than his hatred for a medi-
Ocrity animated by the spirit of levelling

Oud yonny d¢ jhe MWiass

76 ARIEL

and the tyranny of mass. And within
contemporary Scandinavian literature, so
much preoccupied by social questions, the
same idea most often occurs. Ibsen weave:
the lofty harangue of his Stockmann upon
the affirmation that ‘‘ compact majorities
are the greatest danger to liberty anc
truth.’’ And the awesome Nietzsche op.
poses to the ideal of a mediatized humanity
that of supermen who surge above its leve
like a tidal wave. A lively desire for a re.
form of the social system which shall make
secure the leading of the heroic life an
assure to its thought a purer atmospher
of dignity and just consideration is now
everywhere apparent, and promises to be —
a fundamental note in the harmonies of
the coming century. “
Yet the spirit of democracy is essen
tially, for our civilization, a _principh
against which it were idle to rebel. “
discontent we feel for the imperfections of _
its actual historic form has often led us

ARIEL 77

judge unjustly what it has that is both
final and fruitful. Thus Renan’s wisdom
of the aristocrat it is which formulates the
most explicit condemnation of its funda-
mental principle, equality of rights, which
he believes to be permanently contrary
to any possible government of intellectual
superiority. ‘He even goes so far as to call
it, ina forceful image, ‘‘the antipodes of
the path of God—since God has not willed
that all should live in the same degree of
spiritual life.’’ These unjust paradoxes,
together with his famous ideal of an om-
nipotent oligarchy of wise men, are like .
the exaggerated image in a nightmare of
\ some true thought that has obsessed our
» waking hours. Failure to recognize the real
/ work of ork of democracy because it has not yet

succeeded in reconciling its principle of x
equality with social safeguards for that of

_ selection, is as to ignore the parallel labour

of science because, when interpreted in the~ fo.»
narrow manner of a certain school, it has

— ———————— Oo

—_

>,

>>

spin our future ; as Bourget phrases it

~~

, f »
rw) U tov ty QT Vwer ba 1 ra lt VUE Awe

78 ARIEL

occasionally wrought harm to the spirit
of poetry or religion. Democracy and ci
ence are indeed the two props on whic
our civilization rests, the two F Fates th:

“*In them we are, we live, we move.’
As it is impossible, therefore, to hope with
Renan for a more positive consecration of
the moral superiorities, the realization of :
hierarchy of reason, any effective domin-
ion of the loftier gifts of intelligence anc
free will which shall be based on the de.
struction of that democratic equality, —th
only thing left us is to bethink us how t
educate, reform, democracy itself. W
must seek how gradually to inculcate i
popular feeling and custom the idea a
that necessary subordination, the sens
of true superiorities, the instinctive
conscious cultivation of all that multiplie:
the cipher of human worth in the eye 0
reason. ,

Popular education thus acquires its su

c ys Hi y) * (2
tu y¥\ hye V>ssilrl Tre* be TRve Vitinwd

ARIEL | 79

preme interest considered in its relation to
such a work, and with thought for the
future.‘ And it is at school where we first
mould the clay of the multitude; there
come the first and broadest manifestations
of social equity ; schools consecrated to the
equal right of all to learning and the most
efficient measures for superior attainment.
They have to round out a noble task — to
make the sense for order and the will for
justice prime objects of its instruction ; the
realization of all that Authority which is
| legitimate.

There is no distinction more easily lost
\ sight of in the popular mind than that be-
tween equality of opportunity and actual
equality —of influence or of power —
' among members of organized society. All
have the same right to aspire to a moral
_ superiority which may justify and explain

'® £¢ Plus l’instruction se répand, plus elle doit faire de part aux
| idées générales et généreuses. On croit que |’instruction populaire
_ doit étre terre-d-terre. C’est le contraire qui est la vérité.’* —
Fouillée: L’ Idée moderne du droit, Libre, 5, 1v. 7 ~
\

.

80 ~ . ARTEL

an effective one; but only those who have
really achieved the former should be re-
warded by the latter. The true and worthy
notion of equality rests on ‘the assumption
that all reasonable beings are endowed by
nature with faculties capable of a noble
development. The duty of the State con-
sists in seeing that all its members are so
placed as to be able to seek without favour
their own dest; in so arranging things as
to bring tolight each human superiority,
wherever it exists. In such wise, after the
initial equality, inequality, when it comes,
will be justified ; for it will be sanctioned
either by the mysterious powers of nature
or the deserving merit of volition. So un-

ee eee

derstood, democratic equality, far from)

antagonizing a choice of either customs or
_ ideas, will become the useful instrument,
of that spiritual election, the native soil |
for culture. For it is born of intellectual |
energy; as Tocqueville said, poesy and |

eloquence, the graces of the mind, the

B c~

) . > ny ae P ty mn
towers oF Na Tye =) Orr ave Vl arwully AWA

|

ARIEL 81

flashes of the imagination, all these gifts of
the soul, scattered froin the heavens at
hazard, are co-workers in the labour of de-
mocracy and serve it even when they be-
long to its enemies; for they tend to bring
into relief the natural — not the inherited —
greatness of which man’s spirit is capable.
Emulation, the most powerful spur of all
that urge to action, as well in thought as
in other human activities, needs as well
equality at the starting-point in order to
produce at the finish that inequality which
gives the palm to the apter scholar or the
greater man. And the democratic régime
ean carry in its bosom both these two
conditions of emulation only when it does
not degenerate into a levelling equality,
but is content to look forward to it only as
a glorious ideal, a counsel of perfection, a
future equality cf all men in their common
ascent to the highest culture possible,
Rationally conceived, democracy always
admits that indispensable aristocratic prin-

82 ARIEL

ciple which shall concede superiority to the
better man when recognized and sanc-
tioned by the common consent. It conse-
crates, as much as aristocracy, the distinc-
tion of equality; but it resolves in favour
of such qualities as are truly superior —
those of mind, character, virtue. It does
not immobilize them into a separate class
which shall have the execrable privilege of
caste, but renews them continually from
the living fountain of the people, making
justice or affection the reason of their
choice. In such wise recognizing, as a
necessity for any progress, the selection
and predominance of the best equipped, it
avoids that humiliation which in other hu-
man contests falls to the lot of the yan-

A TT

quished. ‘“‘ The great law of natural selec-
\tion will go on functioning in human
| society only so long as it works more and
- \more on a basis of liberty,’’ said Fouillée.
{ The odious character of traditional aristoc-
racies arose in that they were oppressive
'

i arr a i

nfl

- ARTEL . &

in their action and unjust in their founda-
\ |tion, and so their authority became intoler-
‘able. Now we know that there exists no
other legitimate limit for man’s equality
\ than that which consists in the dominio
of intelligence and virtue, freely consented

to by all.

this limit shall exist. On the other hand,
our Christian view of life teaches that those

moral superiorities which | are the basis of
rights really give rise only to duties; and
that each superior being owes to others

more in proportion to his excess in ability

Nietzsche, who seems to have ploughed so

ture of thought, have brought into his tre-

orities, an abominable and reactionary
genius. For, in scoffing at all mercy, all
fraternity, he places in the heart of the su-

ea ae SERPS

mendous revindication of what he calls ,
es ‘natural rights, implicit in human superi-

But we do know that it is necessary that Ro

over them. The anti-equality views of ,,

deep a furrow in our contemporary litera- »,

84 ARIEL

perman he deifies a Satanic disregard of
the weak and the disinherited; he legiti-
mizes all privileges of self-will and force to
governments of the gibbet and the lash,
and with logical resolution comes to his
keynote: ‘Society does not exist for itself,
but for its elect.’’ ‘Truly it is not this mon-
strous notion that we oppose as our stand-
ard to that false equalitarianism which
aims at the levelling of all to a common
vulgarity. Happily, so long as there shall
be in our world the possibility of so dis-
posing two pieces of wood that they form
a Cross — which is to say, eternally—so
long shall future man persist in thinking
that it is Love that is the basis of all stable
order; and that the only true hierarchy is
| that of those who have the highest capac-
* | ity for love.
_ The new science — a fountain of inex-
haustible moral inspirations — shows, in
explaining life’s laws, how the principle
of democracy may be reconciled with an

Ee

———

ARIEL 85

aristocracy of morals or of culture in the
organization of human collectivities. On
the one hand, as Henri Bérenger’s sug-
gestive book has shown, the affirmations
of science but contribute to sanction and
fortify the idea of democracy in society,
revealing how great is the value of collec-

tive effort, how valuable the labour even of
the smallest hand, how immense the field
of action reserved to the anonymous and
obscure fellow-workman in any manifesta-
tion of our ‘social evolution. It exalts, no
less than Christianity, the dignity of the
lowly ; this new thought, which in nature
ascribes to the labour of the infinitely little,
the nummulite and the briozodn at the
depths of the ocean, the construction of the
cements of geology ; which derives from
the vibration of a formless primitive cell

all the elevating impulses of organized life;

which shows the great réle that in our

psychology we must ascribe to vague and
inconspicuous phenomena, even the fugi-

86 ARIEL

tive perceptions of our subconscious self;
and which, coming to sociology and his-
tory, restores to the heroism of the masses,
often doubted, the share which was ig-
nored in the glorification of the individual
hero; and reveals the slow accumulation
of individual research which through many
centuries has prepared, in obscure work-
shops or laboratories of forgotten toilers,
the discoveries of genius.

But at the same time that it thus dem-
onstrates the immortal efficacy of collective
force, and dignifies the participation of un-
known collaborators in the universal work,
science shows that it is a necessary condi-
tion to all progress that there should be
leadership amid the immense mass of per-
sons and of things. Relations of depend-
ence and subordination are a condition of
life, between the individual members of
society and the elements of individual or-
ganization. In fine, there is an inherent
necessity for the universal law of imitation

IPCI OLE I =

ARIEL - SF

that there be present models, alive and in-
fluential, for the making perfect human
society, to realize their superiority by the
progressive making general of it.

To show how both these universal les-
sons of science can be transformed into
action, working together in the organiza-
tion and spirit of society, we need only
insist on_our conception of a_ democracy
that isjust)and (noble ; repelled only by the

in which the supremacy. of. intelligence
and _v. virtue, the only limits to the just
equality of men, receives its authority and _,
prestige from liberty and_sheds over all
multitudes the beneficent aura of love.
And at the same time that it reconciles these
two great lessons, of our observation of
the order of nature, such a society will
realize the harmony of two historic forces
which give our civilization its essential
character, its regulative principles of life.
From the spirit of Christianity, in fact,

88 _ _- ARTEL

is born the sentiment of equality, albeit
tainted now with something of the ascetic
disdain for culture and, selection of the
spirit. And from the classic civilizations
rises that sense for order, for authority,
and the almost religious respect for genius,
though tainted with something of aristo-
cratic disdain for the weak and the lowly.
The future shall synthesize these two sug-
gestions in immortal formula; then shall
Democracy havetriumphed definitely. De-
mocracy — which, when threatening an ig-
noble levelling, justifies the lofty protests
and the bitter meiancholies of those who see
sacrificed in her triumph all intellectual dis-
tinction, every dream of art, each delicacy
of life, — will, now even more than the old
aristocracies, extend inviolable guaranties
for the cultivation of those flowers of the
soul which fade and perish in the surround-
ings of the vulgar, amid the pitiless tumult
of the multitude. |

)

_\~ The utilitarian conception as the idea of
_ human destiny, and equality at the medi-
ocre as the norm of social proportion,
make up the formula which in Europe
they call the spirit of Americanism. It is
impossible to think on either of these as
inspirations for human conduct or society,
while contrasting them with those which
are opposed to them, without at once con-
juring up by association a vision of that
formidable and fruitful democracy there
in the North, with its manifestations of
prosperity and power, as a dazzling ex-
ample in favour of the efficacy of demo-
cratic institutions and the correct aim of
its ideas. If one could say of utilitarianism |

ARIEL 9

the United States may be considered the |

incarnation of that word. Its Evangel is
spread on every side to teach the material
miracles of its triumph. And Spanish
America is not wholly to be entitled, in its
relation to the United States, as a nation

that it is the word of the English spirit, »

90 ARIEL

of Gentiles. The mighty confederation is

realizing over us a sort of moral conquest.

_Admiration for its greatness, its strength,

is a sentiment that is growing rapidly in
the minds of our governing classes, and
even more, perhaps, among the multitude,
easily impressed with victory or success.
And from admiring it is easy to pass to
imitating. Admiration and belief are al-
ready for the psychologist but the passive
mood of imitation. ‘* The imitative tend-
ency of our moral nature,’’ says Bagehot,
“has its seat in that part of the soul
where lives belief.” Common sense and
experience would suffice of themselves to
show this natural relation. We imitate
him in whose superiority and prestige we
believe. So it happens that the vision of
a voluntarily delatinized America, without
compulsion or conquest, and regenerate
in the manner of its Northern archetype,
floats already through the dreams of many
who are sincerely interested in our future,

ARIEL =.

satisfies them with suggestive parallels
they find at every step, and appears in
constant movements for reform or innova-
tion. We have our mania for the North. | ~~
It is necessary to oppose to it those bounds
which both sentiment and reason indicate.

{ Not that I would make of those limits
an absolute negation. I well understand
that enlightenment, inspiration, great les- |
sons lie in the example of the strong ; nor do
I fail to realize that intelligent attention to |
the claims of the material and the study of
the useful, directed abroad, is of espe-
cially useful result in the case of people in
the formative stage, whose nationality is
still in the mould. I understand how one
must try by persevering education to rec-|
tify such traits of a society as need to be
made to fit in with new demands of civi-
lization and new opportunities in life, thus
by wise innovation counteracting the forces
of heredity or custom. But I see no good |
in denaturalizing the character of a people

92 ARIEL

— its personal genius — to impose on it

identity with a foreign model to which

they will sacrifice the originality of their

use h | genius, that, once lost, can never be re-

placed; nor in the ingenuous fancy that

this result may ever be obtained artifi-

cially or by process of imitation. That

| thoughtless attempt to transplant what is

natural and spontaneous in one society into

the soil of another where it has no roots,

historically or naturally, seemed to Miche-

let like the attempt to incorporate by mere

transference a dead organism in a living
body.

~ In societies, as in art or literature, blind

* \|/ imitation gives but an inferior copy of the

: | model. And in the vain attempt there is

also something ignoble; a kind of political

snobbery, carefully to copy the ways and

acts of the great ; as, in Thackeray’s satire,

those without rank or fortune ineffectually

imitate only the foibles of the mighty.

» Care for one’s own independence, per-

q ARIEL 8

sonality, judgment, is a chief form of self-
respect. A much-commented passage of /
Cicero teaches how it is our duty sedu- |
lously to preserve our original character ;
that which differentiates and determines,
so far as may wisely be, the primal natural
impulses, as they derive from a various dis-
tribution of natural gifts and so make up
the concert and the order of the world.
And even more would this seem to be true
as applied to human collectivities. But per-
haps you will say that there is no seal, no
peculiar and definite thing to mark the
quality for whose permanence and _integ-
rity we should do battle in the actual organ-
ization of our people. Perhaps there lacks)
in our South American character the defi- ||
nite contour of a personality. But even so, | »
we Latin-Americans have an inheritance |
of Race, a great ethnic tradition to main-
tain, a sacred bond which unites us to im-
mortal pages of history and puts us on our |
honour to preserve this for the future! That

.
GY

94 ARIEL

cosmopolitanism which we have to respect
as the irresistible tendency of our develop-
ment need not exclude that sentiment of
fidelity to the past, nor that moulding and
directing force of which the genius of our
race must avail itself in the fusing of the
elements that shall constitute the American

‘of the future.

It has more than once been pointed out
that the great epochs of history, its most
fertile periods, are always the result of dis-

” tinct but coexisting forces which by their
»” very agreement to oppose maintain the in-

terest and stimulus of life, which in the
quietism of a universal accord might tend
to disappear. So the two extremes of
Athens and Sparta revolve on an axle
around which circles the race of greatest —
genius man has known. So America needs
at this time to maintain its original duality,
which has converted from classic myth to
actual history the story of the two eagles,

loosed at the same moment from either

ARIEL — «95

pole, to arrive at the same moment at each
one’s limit of dominion, This difference
in genius does not exciude honourable
emulation, nor discourage in very many
relations agreement or even solidarity.
And if one can dimly foresee even a higher
concord in the future, that will be due not
to a one-sided imitation of one race by the
other, but to a reciprocity of influences and
a skilful harmonizing of those attributes
which make the peculiar glory of either
race.

Still, the dispassionate study of that
civilization whicb some would offer to us
as a model, affords a reason no less potent
than those which are based only on the in-
dignity and unworthiness of mere imita-
tion to temper the enthusiasm of those who
propose it as our model. .. . And now I
come to the very theme of my discourse,
and the relation to it of this spirit of imita-
tion. | Any severe judgment formed upon
our neighbours of the North should begin,

. aft
')

e

96 ARIEL

like the courteous fencer, by lowering a
rapier in salute to them. Easy is this for

- me. Failure to recognize their faults does

not seem to me so insensate as to deny
their qualities. Born — to employ Beau-
delaire’s paradox — with the innate ex-
perience of liberty, they have kept them-

| selves faithful to the law of their birth;
and have developed, with the precision and
certainty of a mathematical progression,

| the fundamental principles of their organi-

Nes x)

zation. This gives to their history a unity
which, even if it has excluded the acquire-

‘ ‘ment of different aptitudes or merits, has

|
jat least the intellectual beauty of being logi-

_cal. The traces of its progress will never be
expunged from the annals of human right,
because they have been the first to evoke
our modern ideal of liberty and to convert
it from the uncertainty of experiment and
the visions of Utopia into imperishable
bronze and living reality. For they have
shown by their example the possibility of

ARIEL Me

extending the immovable authority of a re-
public over an immense national common-
wealth, and, with their federal organiza- “
tion, have revealed — as de Tocqueville
felicitously put it — the manner in which
the brilliancy and power of great states
may be combined with the felicity and
peace of little ones. . .

_ Theirs are many of the most daring
deeds for which the perspective of time
shall distinguish this century ; theirs is the
glory of having revealed completely the |
greatness and dignity of labour, thereby
accentuating the firmest note of moral ”
beauty in all our civilization; that blest
force which antiquity abandoned to the
abjection of slavery, and which to-day we
identify with the highest expression of hu-
man dignity, based on the consciousness
and the exertion of its own merit. Strong,
tenacious of purpose, holding inaction as
opprobrious, they have placed in the
hands of the mechanic of their shops and

98 ARIEL

the farmer of their fields the mystic key of
Hercules, and have given to human gen-
ius a new and unwonted beauty, girding
it with the leathern apron of the hand-
worker. Each one of these presses on to
conquer life as his Puritan ancestors did
the wilderness. Persistent followers of that
creed of individual energy which makes
of every man the artificer of his destiny,

_ they have modelled their commonwealth

on a kind of imaginary population of Cru-
soes, who, as soon as they have roughly
attended to their training in the art of
taking care of themselves, will turn to the
making of themselves into a stable State.
And, never sacrificing to this their concep-
tion of the sovereign Individual, they yet

- have known how at the same time to make

of their association the most admirable in-
strument of their grandeur and empire;
they have got from the sum of their ener-
gies, as devoted to research, industry,
philanthropy, results that are the more

sem

ARIEL — «99

marvellous in that they were secured with
the most absolute integrity of their per-
sonal liberty.

They have a sleepless and insatiable in-
stinct of curiosity, an impatient eagerness ¥
for the light; and, carrying a fondness
for public education almost to the point
of monomania, have made the common
school the surest prop of their prosperity, ”
believing that the mind of the child should
be the most cherished of their precious
things. /Their culture, while far from
being spiritual or refined, has an admirable
efficiency so far as it is directed to practical v
ends and their immediate realization. And,
while they have not added to the acquisi-.
tions of science a single general law, one.
new principle, they have done wonders in

its application to new inventions and made / |

giant strides in its service to utilities ; in
the steam boiler, the electric dynamo, are
now billions of invisible slaves who cen-

tuple for their Aladdin the power of the

>

>

100 ARIEL

magic lamp. The growth of their great-

\ ness and power will astonish future gen-
erations. By their marvellous gift for im-
provisation they have found a spur to time,
so that in a few years they conjure, as it
were from a desert, the fruitage hitherto
the work of centuries.

And that Puritan liberty which gave
them light in the past unites with that
light a piety which still endures. Beside
the factory and the school it has erected
churches whence ascend the prayers of
millions of free consciences. | They have
been able to save from the shipwreck of
all the idealities that which is the high-
est of all, and kept alive the tradition
of a religious sentiment which, if it does
not uplift on wings of the highest ideal-

| ism, spirituality, at least maintains over
the utilitarian stampede some rein of the
moral sense. Also, they have known how
to maintain a certain primitive robustness
even amidst the refinements of a highly

ARIEL 101

civilized life; they hold to the pagan cult
of health, sanity, and strength; they pre-
serve in strong muscles the instrument of
a strong will; obliged by their insatiable
ambition to employ all human energies,

they fit the torso of the athlete over the |

heart of the free man. And from all this
springs a dominant note of optimism, con-
fidence, faith, which makes them face the
future with a proud and stubborn assur-
ance; the note of ‘‘ Excelsior’’ and the
“*Psalm of Life,’’ which their poets have
opposed as a balsam to melancholy or bit-
terness of spirit.

Thus it is that their Titanic greatness
impresses even those made most distrust-
ful by their. exaggerations of character
and the recent violences of their history ;
and I, who do not love them, as you see,
admire them still. I admire them, first, for
their formidable power of desire; I bow
before that ‘‘ school of will and work’? —
which Philarete Chasles tells us they have
inherited from their forbears.

poe

102 ARIEL

In the beginning was Action. With these
famous words of Faust the future historian
of the great Republic may begin; the
Genesis, not yet concluded, of their na-
tional existence. Their genius may be de-
fined as the universe of the Dynamists:

¥ force in movement. Abcve all, it has the
| capacity, the enthusiasm, the fortunate
“vocation, for doing things; volition is the
~ chisel which has shapen this people from
hard rock.\ Their characteristic points are
“manifestations of the will-power, origi-
Nnality, and audacity. Their history is
above all a very paroxysm of virile activ-
ity. Their typical figure should be entitled,
_ not Superman, but He who wants.\ And if
anything saves them collectively from vul-
garity, it is that extraordinary verve of
! energy which they always show and which
¥ lends a certain epic character to even the
struggles of self-interest and the material
life. So Bourget could say, of the specu-
lators of Minneapolis and Chicago that

ARIEL ~ 103

they are of the mould of gladiators, that
their fighting power of attack or of defence
is as of Napoleon’s soldiers of the Guard.
Yet that supreme energy with which the
North American seems to cast, as if by
hypnotizing, a spell and suggestion over
the Fates, is found only in just those things
which are presented to us as exceptional,
divergent, in their civilization. No one will
say that Edgar Poe was not an anomalous
individual, rebellious to the influences
around him: his chosen spirit represented
a particle inassimilable by the national
soul, which vainly struggled to express it-
self to others as from an infinite solitude;
yet the fundamental note — Baudelaire has
pointed it out — in the character of Poe’s
heroes is still the inner shrine, the uncon-
querable resistance of the will. When he
imagined Ligeia, most mysterious and
adorable of his creatures, he symbolized
in the inextinguishable light of her eyes
the hymn of the triumph of man’s will
over death.

104 ARIEL

If now by a sincere recognition of what
is great and brilliant in the genius of that
mighty country I have acquired the right
to complete the picture by meting even-
handed justice, one question, full of inter-
est, still presents itself: Does that society
realize, or at least tend to realize, the ideal
of such rational conduct as satisfies, to the
heart’s desire, the intellectual and moral
dignity of our civilization? Is it there that
we shall find the most approximate image
of our perfect State? That feverish unrest
which seems to centuple in its bosom the
movement, the intensity of life —has it an
end that is worth while and a motive suf-
ficient for its justification ?

Herbert Spencer, when with a noble
sincerity he framed his parting address to
the democracy of America at a New York
banquet, marked as the chief feature of
North American life that same overflow-
ing unrest which shows itself both in the
infinite passion for work and in vainglory

” a

ARIEL — 105

in all forms of material expansion. Later
he said that so exclusive a preoccupation
with those activities which make for im-
mediate utility revealed a notion of life,
tolerable indeed in a young country as a
provisional stage of civilization, but which
already needed rectifying as it tended to
make ‘‘ useful’ labor the end and. object
of all living; whereas in no case can it
mean more than the accumulation of those
things which are only the necessary ele-
ments to a full and harmonious develop-
ment of our being. And he added that it
behooved them now to teach their people
the gospel of rest or recreation; and we,
identifying these words with the otium of
the ancients, will include in this gospel to
be taught those restless toilers any ideal
concern, any disinterested employment of
one’s time, any object of meditation or
study divorced from all relation to imme-
diate utilitarian interest.

North American life, indeed, describes

.

4
.

¢>
Af

wh)

e"

>

106 ARIEL

that vicious circle which Pascal remarked

»in the ceaseless seeking for well-being

when it has no object outside of oneself.

Its prosperity is as immense as its incapa-

bility of satisfying even a mediocre view
of human destiny. | Titanic in its enor-

mous concentration of human will-power, »

in its unprecedented triumph in all spheres
of material aggrandizement, its civiliza-
tion yet produces as a whole a singular
impression of insufficiency, of emptiness.
And if man’s spirit demands, with all the
reason that thirty centuries of growth un-
der classic and under Christian influence
have conferred upon it, what are in this
new world the dirigent principles, —the
ideal substratum, the ulterior end of allthis
concernment with the positive interests that
so informs that mighty multitude, — he
will only be met, as a definite formula, by

that same exclusive interest in material tri- ©

umphs. |Orphaned of the profound tradi-
tion that attended his birth, the North

ARIEL 107

=__

American has not yet replaced the inspir- | +
ing ideality of his past with any high un- |
selfish conception of the future. He lives |
for the immediate reality of the present, -
and for this subordinates all his activities |
in the egoism of material well-being, albeit |
both individual and collectivd. Of all his
aggregation of the elements of wealth and
power, one might say, what Bourget said
of the intelligence of his character the
Marquis Norbert, “‘a mountain of wood
to which they have not yet known how to
set fire.’’ The vital spark is lacking to
throw up that flame of the ideal, restless,
life-giving, from that mountain of dead
wood. Not even the selfishness of patriot-
ism, for want of higher impulses, nor the
pride of race, both of which transfigured
and exalted in ancient days even the pro-
saic hardness of the life of Rome, can
light a glimmer of ideality or beauty in a
people where a cosmopolite confusion and
the atomism of a badly understood democ-

108 ARIEL

racy impede the formation of a veritable
national conscience. |

One might think that the positivist
genius of England has suffered a sea-
change in crossing the Atlantic so as to
fill its sons there with a spirit deprived of
those elements of ideality which tempered
it at home, and thus really reducing it to
the crudeness which only the exaggeration
of passion or satire has ascribed to its
English form. For the English spirit, un-
der its rough utilitarian exterior, its mer-
cantile cynicism, its Puritanic severity, al-
ways concealed a rare poetic genius and a
deep respect for the finer sensibility, which
caused ‘Taine to hold that at the bottom
of the Teutonic nature, which is the base
of the English race, must exist, however
modified by the pressure of conquest or
the habit of trade, an extraordinary exal-
tation of the emotional qualities. But the
American spirit has not inherited this an-
_ cestral poetic instinct, which gushes like

ARIEL — 109

a clear fountain from the British rock
when itis a Moses of high art who touches
it. The English people possess in their in-
. stitution of aristocracy (however unequal
and out of date it may appear in the po-
litical aspect) a lofty and solid bulwark to
oppose to the shopkeeping spirit and the
encroachment of a prosaic world ; so solid
and lofty that Taine could say that since
Grecian times history has presented no ex-
ample of a society more fit to breed noble
men and a noble spirit. / But in the ambient:
of America’s democracy there are no
heights so lofty as to escape the climbing * \
of the flood of vulgarity, and it spreads and |
extends itself freely as over a level plain.
Sensibility, intelligence, manners —
each is marked in that enormous people
by a radical unaptness for selection ; and |
this, with the mechanical ordering of their
material activities, makes a chaos of all. |
that pertains to the realm of the ideal. It . *
were easy to follow this unaptness from

,

110 ARIEL

its most obvious manifestations to the more
intimate and essential ones. Prodigal of
riches — for meanness is not his fault —
the North American has learned only to
acquire by them the satisfaction of his
vanity and material luxury, but not the
chosen note of good taste. In such a sur-
rounding true art can only exist as the re-
bellion of an individual. Emerson, Poe,
are as estrays of a fauna expelled from
their true habitat by some geological catas-
trophe. In ‘‘Outre Mer’’ Bourget speaks
of the solemn tone in which the North
American utters the word Art, when he, a
self-made man, has achieved riches which
he now desires to crown with all the human
refinements; but he never has felt the di-
vine frenzy of poem or picture; he would
buy but to add to his collection a new toy,
to satisfy at once his vanity and his acquisi-
tive instinct. That in it which is disin-
terested, chosen, rare, he ignores, despite
the munificence with which he scatters his

ar 2 Ny

ARIEL ill

individual fortune to found schools of art,
form popular taste, build splendid mu-
seums, patronize huge expositions, and
deck his cities with monuments and his
streets with bronze and marble. And if
one had to characterize his taste, in a word,
it would be that which in itself involves the
negation of great art; strained brutality of
effect, insensibility to soft tones or an ex-
quisite style, the cult of bigness, and that
sensationalism which excludes all noble
serenity as incompatible with the hurry of
his hectic life.

(The ideal of beauty does not appeal to
the descendants of the austere Puritan, nor
even a passionate worship of the truth;
they care little for any thinking that has
no immediate practical object — it seems
to them idle and fruitless; even to science
they bring no selfless interest for discovery,
nordo they seem capable of loving its truths
only because they are true; investigation

is merely the necessary antecedent of prac- |’

112 ARIEL

tical application. Their praiseworthy ef-
forts toextend the benefits of popular educa-
tion are inspired with the noble motive of
communicating the rudiments of knowl-
edge to the masses; but it does not appear
that they also concern themselves over-
much with that higher education which
shall rise above the general mediocrity.
And so the outcome is that of all their
struggle with ignorance the only gain has
been a sort of universal semiculture and a
profound indifference to the higher. ... As
fast as the general ignorance decreases, so,
in the air of that giant democracy, de-
creases the higher learning and vanishes
genius itself. This is why the story of
their intellectual activity is of a retrogres-
sion in brilliance and originality. For while
at the era of their Independence and Con-
stitution many famous names illustrate
their history in thought as well as in action,
a half-century later de Tocqueville could
say of them, the Gods are disappearing.

ARIEL 113

And, when he wrote his master work, there
still radiated from Boston, the Puritan
home, the city of learning and tradition, a
glorious pleiad which holds in the intel-
lectual story of our century a universal
fame. Who since has picked up the heri-
tage of Emerson, Channing, Poe? The
levelling by the middle classes tends ever,
pressing with its desolating task, to plane
down what little remains of intelligentsia :
_ the flowers are mown by the machine when
the weeds remain.

Long since their books have ceased to
soar on wings beyond the common vision.
To-day the most actual example of what
Americans like best in literature must be
sought in the gray pages of magazines or
periodicals which seldom remind one that
that mode of publication was employed i in
the immortal ‘‘Federalist.’?

In the domain of moral sentiment, the
mechanical impulse for the utilitarian has,
indeed, encountered a certain balance-

114 ARIEL

wheel in a strong religious tradition; but
one may not conclude that even this has
given to the direction of conduct a real,
disinterested principle. ... American re-
ligiosity, derived from the English and ex-
aggerated, is merely an auxiliary force for
the penal law, and would disappear on the
day it was found possible without it to
give to utilitarian morality that religious
sanction which Mill desired for it. The

very culmination of that morality is only .

that of Franklin; a philosophy of conduct
which has for its goal a commonplace sa-
gacity, a prudent usefulness, in whose

bosom will never rise the emotions of holi- |
ness or heroism; and which, fit only to.

give to one’s conscience in the common
affairs of life a certain moral support —
like the apple-tree cane with which Frank-
lin ever walked —is but a fragile staff
with which to surmount great heights.
And yet his was its supreme height: it is
in the valleys where one must seek for its

a thre wes

meaner
concen

ARIEL 115

actuality. Even if the moral critique were
not to descend below the probity and mod-
eration of Franklin’s standard, its neces-
sary termination, as de Tocqueville wisely
said of a society educated narrowly with
similar notions of duty, would surely not be
in that superb and noble decadence which
gives us to measure a Satanic beauty of
tragedy in the downfall of empires, but
rather a kind of pallid materialism, drab
culture, and finally the sleep of an enerva-
tion without brilliancy in the silent decay
of all the mainsprings of the moral life. In
that society whose precept tends to put
outside of what is obligatory the higher
manifestations of abnegations and of vir-
tue, practical considerations will always
make the limits of obligation recede indefi-
nitely. And the school of material pros-
perity, always a rude teacher of repub-

lican austerity, has carried even further

that simplicity of the conception of a ra-
tional conduct which now obsesses the

116 ARIEL

‘it.

mind. To Franklin’s code have succeeded
others franker still in their expression of
the national wisdom. A book by one Swett °
Marden was recently* published in Bos-
ton, “‘ Pushing to the Front,’’ which an-
nounced, apparently with much popular
approval, as a new moral law, that suc-
cess is the final end of life; this book was
praised even in church circles, and com-
pared to the ‘‘Imitation’’ of A Kempis!...

And public life does not escape the con-
sequences of the growth of this germ of
disorganization in society generally. Any
casual observer of their political customs
will tell you how the obsession of materia]
interest tends steadily to enervate and
eradicate the sentiment of law or right; the
civic virtue of a Hamilton is as an old
and rusty sword, every day the more for-
gotten, lost in the cobwebs of tradition;
venality, beginning at the polls, spreads
through the working of all their institu-
11894. The book seems to have had less effect than Rod6 feared.

ARIEL 117

tions; the government by a mediocrity
renders vain that emulation which exalts
the character and the intelligence, and im-
poses itself even on the imagination as an
unavoidable future. A democracy not sub-
ject to a superior instruction, not trained
in liberal schools to the understanding of
true human excellence, tends always to
that abominable brutality of the majority
which despises the greater moral benefits
of liberty and annuls in public opinion all
respect for the dignity of the individual.
And to-day a new and formidable power
arises to accentuate this absolutism of
numbers: the political influence of a plu-
tocracy represented only by the agents of |
the trusts, monopolies of production, and
lords of the economic life, one of the most
noteworthy and significant features of the
United States of to-day. Their advent has
caused almost everybody to recall to mind
the coming of that proud and over-rich
class which at the end of the Roman Re-

118 ARIEL

public preceded the tyranny of the Czesars
and the ruin of liberty. And the exclusive
preoccupation with material aggrandize-
ment, the deity of such a civilization, has
its logical result on the State as on the in-
dividual, putting the struggle-for-life prin-
ciple also at the head of national policy,
and making its representative the supreme
personification of the national energy —
the postulant of Emerson, the ruling per-
sonage of ‘Taine.

To the impulse which drives the spirit-
ual life toward that deorientation of the
ideal to the selfishly useful corresponds
physically that other principle which in
the astounding increase of that people im-
pels both the multitude and the initiative
ever in the direction of that boundless
West which in the times of their first in-
dependence was all mystery, veiled behind
the forests of the Mississippi. In fact that
improvised West—which grows so for-
midable to the older Atlantic States and

ARIEL (119

already claims hegemony in the near fu-
ture —is where the most faithful represen-
tation of American life is to be found at
this moment of its evolution. It is there
where the definite results, the logical and
_ natural fruits of the spirit that has guided
the great democracy from its origin, are
brought into relief for the observer so that
he can picture to himself the aspect of its
immediate future. To the Virginian, the
Yankee, has succeeded the master of the
yesterday empty prairies, of whom Michel
Chevalier predicted, half a century since,
**The last shall one day be the first.’’
Utilitarianism, empty of all ideal content,
a certain cosmopolitan levity of spirit, and
the levelling of a falsely conceived democ-
racy, will in him reach their ultimate vic-
tory. Every noble element of that civiliza-
tion, all which binds it to the generous
traditions and lofty origin of its historic
dignity — the arrival of the men of the
_ Mayflower, the memory of the Patricians

120 ARIEL

of Virginia and the warriors of New Eng- |
land, the spirit of the people and law-
makers of the Emancipation — will remain
only in the older States, where a Boston
or a Philadelphia still maintain “‘the pal-
ladium of the Washingtonian tradition.”’
Chicago will arise to reign. And its
overweening superiority over the original
States of the Atlantic shore is based on its
belief that they are reactionary, too Euro-
pean, too subject to tradition. History —
confers no claims on any, where popular
election confers the purple.
As fast as the utilitarian genius of that
; nation takes on a more defined character,
“os | franker, narrower yet, with the intoxica-
; .» | tion of material prosperity, so increases the
| impatience of its sons to spread it abroad
{by propaganda, and think it predestined
for all humanity. ‘To-day they openly
aspire to the primacy of the world’s civi-
_ jization, the direction of its ideas, and think
themselves the forerunners of all culture

ARIEL ‘721

that is to prevail. The colloquial phrase,
ironically quoted by Laboulaye, *‘ America
can beat the world, ’’ is taken seriously by
almost any virile Westerner.. At the bot-
tom of their open rivalry with Europe lies
a contempt for it that is almost naive, and
the profound conviction that within a
brief period they are destined to eclipse its
glory and do away with its spiritual supe-
riority; thus once more fulfilling, in the
progress of civilization, the hard law of
the ancient mysteries, whereby the initi-
ated shall put to death the asi be It were
useless to seek to convince them that, al-
though their services to inventions and ma-
terial advance have been doubtless great,
even rising to the measure of a universal
human obligation, they do not of them-
selves suffice to alter the axis of the earth.
_ It were useless to seek to convince them that
_ the fires lit upon European altars, the work
done by peoples living these three thousand
years gone by about the shores of the Medi-

122 ARIEL

terranean, though rising to glorious genius
when bound with the olive and the palm of
Athens, a work still being carried on and
in whose traditions and teachings we
South Americans live, makes a sum which
cannot be equalled by any equation of
Washington plus Edison. Would they
even revise the Book of Genesis, to put
themselves upon the front page ?

But, aside from the insufficiency of the
part that is given them to play in the edu-
cation of humanity, their own character
itself precludes all possibility of their he-
gemony. Nature has not granted them
the genius for propaganda, the vocation of
the apostle. They lack that great gift of
amiability — likeableness, in a lofty sense ;
that extraordinary power of sympathy
with which those races endowed by Provi-
dence for the task of education know how ~
to make of their culture a beauty, as did
Greece, ioveable, eternal, and yet always
with something of their own,

ee

a

a

ARIEL es

North American civilization may abound
— it does abound — in fertile suggestions,
profitable examples ; it may inspire admi-
ration, astonishment, respect; but it is rare
for the foreigner to feel his heart come to
his mouth with strong emotion when first
he sees that Bartholdi statue holding high
its torch of Liberty over New York Har-
bour; that thrill profound with which the
ancient traveller saw the rosy light of the
marble and the sheen of Athena’s spear
over the early dawn on the Acropolis.

But please remember that when I, in
the name of their soul’s rights, deny to
their utilitarianism the right to impose it-
self as typical of the future on the world
as mould or model, I do not in the least as-
sert that its labours are wasted even in re-
lation to those things which we may call
soul-interests. ... Without the arm which

clears and constructs, there might now

be no shelter for the brain that thinks;
without some certain conquest of the

124 ARIEL

materialities, the rule of the spiritualities
in human societies becomes impossible.
Renan’s aristocratic idealism recognized,
even from the point of view of the moral
interest of the race and its future spiritual
development, the import of the utilitarian
»abour of this century; “‘To get away
from need is to redeem oneself.’’ In the
remote past even the prosaic and selfish
activities of the merchant resulted in put-
ting for the first time a people in relation
with others, and thus had a far-reaching
effect on men’s ideas ; since this had much
to do with multiplying the means of intel-
ligence, refining and softening manners,
perhaps even showing the way to a more
advanced morality ; and the same positive
force appears later, favouring the higher
ideals of civilization. It was the gold ac-
cumulated by the merchants of the Italian
republics that paid, says Saint-Victor, for
the works of the Renaissance. The ships
that came back from the countries of the

ARIEL 125

Thousand and One Nights, laden with
ivory and spices, made it possible for
Lorenzo di Medici to renew in Florentine
merchants’ houses the feast of Plato. All
history shows a definite relation of growth
between the progress of utilitarian activity
and the ideal. And just as the former can
be turned into a shelter and protection
for the latter, so the ideas of the mind often
give rise to utilitarian results, above all
when these latter are not sought directly.
For instance, Bagehot remarks that the im-
mense positive benefits of navigation might
never have been attained for humanity if in
earliest times there had not been dreamers,

“apparently idle — and certainly misunder-
stood by their contemporaries — who were
interested solely in the contemplation of the
movements of the stars.

This law of harmony bids us also respect
the arm that labours arduously in what
seems a barren and prosaic soil. The work
of North American positivism will also at

126 ARIEL

the end serve the cause of Ariel. That
which this people of Cyclops have achieved
for the direct purpose of material advan-
tage, with all their sense for what is useful
and their admirable faculty of mechani-
cal invention, will be converted by other
peoples, or later, even by themselves, to a
wealth of material for the higher selection.
Thus that most precious and fundamental
invention of the alphabet, which gives the
wings of immortality to the spoken word,
originated in Phcenician shops, the discov-
ery of merchants who only desired to
keep their accounts. Using it for purposes
merely mercenary, they never dreamed
that the genius of a superior race would
transfigure and transform it to a means of
perpetuating the light and the learning of
their own being. The relation between
material good and good that is intellec-
tual or moral is thus only a new aspect of
that modern doctrine which we call the
transformation of energy ; material well-

ARIEL : i

being may be transformed into spiritu
superiority.

But North American life does not as
yet offer us any new example of this indis-
cutable relation, nor even dimly suggest
it as the triumph of the generation to
come.

Our wish and our belief, indeed, incline
us to hope that a superior destiny may be
reserved for that civilization in a time not
too remote for prophecy; the more that,
under the spur of their energy, even the
brief time that separates them from their
dawn has sufficed to satisfy the expendi-
ture of the vitality required for such im-
menseachievement. Their past, their pres-
ent, must be but the entry-way to a great

. future. Yet all shows that this is still far

away from its definitive. ‘The assimilative
energy which has so far enabled them to
maintain a certain uniformity as well as
some touch of genius, despite the enor-
mous inrush of ethnic elements opposed to

128 | ARIEL

those which have so far made the basis of
their character, will have to do battle every
day more strenuous, and in their utilitari-
anism, which proscribes all ideality, will
find no inspiration sufficiently strong to
maintain their solidarity with the older
ideal. The illustrious thinker, who com-
pared the slave of olden times to an atom
outside the attraction of the social orbit,
might well use the same comparison to
characterize that numerous colony of Ger-
man origin now peopling the Middle and
Northern West, which preserves intact in
their nature, their society, and their cus-
toms, the impression of that German spirit
which in many of its profoundest and
strongest characteristics must be consid-
ered as the actual antithesis of the Ameri-
can. . . . And also, a civilization which is
destined to survive and spread throughout
the world; which has not mummified it-
self in the manner of the Chinese by losing
all capability of change; cannot indefi-

ARIEL 129

nitely prolong the direction of its energies
to one order of things.alone. Let_us hope,
then, that the spirit of that Titanic organ-
ism, which has so far been: utility and
will-power only, may some day also be in-
telligence, sentiment, ideality ; that from
that mighty forge may arise, in last re-
sult, the noble human figure, harmonious,
select, that Spencer foreshadowed in the
discourse I have adverted to. But we may
not look for him in the present reality of
that people, nor in their immediate future ;
and we must give up hoping to find the
perfect type of an exemplary civilization
in what is now but a rough sketch, huge
and misshapen, having to pass through
many correcting hands before it assumes
the serene, the perfect shape of a people
that have fully developed their genius and
contemplate their work, finis coronat, glo-
-riously crowned. So, in his “‘ Dream of
the Condor,’’ Leconte de Lisle depicts
the ascension on strong wings and at last

130 ARIEL

the Olympian tranquillity far above the

snowpeaks of the Cordilleras!

Before posterity, before history, every
great people ought to appear as a growth
whose harmonious development has pro-
duced a fruit whose fine essence offers to
the future the fragrance of its ideality and
a fecund seed. Without this durable,
human result, raised above the transitory
end of the immediately useful, the power
and grandeur of empires are but as dreams
of a night in the existence of man, to be
unheeded, uncounted in the doings of the
day which weave the world’s destiny. A
great civilization, a great people, in the eye
of history, is that which after its time has

passed still leaves the chords of its memory
| vibrating, its spirit a lasting legacy to pos-
terity, a new and divine portion of the sum
of things. So Carlyle said of the souls of
his heroes. So when Helena, in Goethe’s
poem, called from the realms of night, re-
turns again to the shades, she leaves to

ARIEL 131

Faust her tunic and her veil; the vestments
are not herself, but as she has worn them,
they breathe of her divineness and possess
ever a spell to elevate the soul of him who
keeps them above all vulgar things.

An organized society which limits its
idea of civilization to the accumulation of
material abundance, and of justice to their
equitable distribution among its members,
will never make of its great cities anything
that differs essentially from the heaping-up
of anthills. Populous, opulent cities do not
suffice to make a civilization immutable,
intensive; they are, indeed, necessary for
the highest culture, are its natural atmos-
phere; the soul of the great man can
rarely grow from amid the petty interests
of small towns; but this quantitative side
of a nation’s greatness, like the size of its
armies, is but means, not results. Of the
stones of Carthage not one remains to bear
any message of light, and all the immen-
sity of Babylon or Nineveh does not fill in

132 ARIEL

human memory the hollow of man’s hand
as compared with the few furlongs that
lie between the Acropolis and the Pirzus.
In the perspective of the ideal no city ap-
pears great, though it occupy all the space
around the towers of Nimrod, nor strong
because it can build again those Baby-
lonian walls which carried six chariots
abreast; nor beautiful because it was paved
with flagstones of alabaster and girt with
the gardens of Semiramis. ... No. In this
view that city only is great whose spirit’s
barriers extend far beyond the mountains
or the seas, whose very name pronounced
illuminates for posterity an epoch of hu-
man thought, a horizon of history. It is
strong and lovely when its days are some-
thing more than the invariable repetition
of the same echo, repeated in never-ending
circle; when in it there is something which
. floats above the faces of the crowd; when
amid its night lights there are the lamps
which light the solitude of vigils devoted

ARIEL 133

—

only to thought; thoughts whence germi-
nate ideas which are to come to the sun-
light of the coming day with a cry to
humanity, a force that shall compel men’s
souls.

Then only may the extent and material
greatness of the city measure the intensity
of its civilization. Royal capitals, avenues
of proud palaces, are a narrower home
than the desert for man’s thinking when
it is not thought that overlords them. In
Tennyson’s “‘Maud’’ there is a symbol
of this torturing of the soul when man’s
society leaves it still in solitude ; where the
hero in his madness dreams himself to
be dead and buried but a few feet under-
ground, beneath a London pavement; and
his consciousness remains, despite his
death, attached to the poor remains of his
body ; the confused clamour of the street
makes a dull rumbling that shakes his nar-
row tomb and impedes his every dream of
peace; the weight of an indifferent multi-

134 ARIEL

tude weighs heavily above his grave, the
heavy tread of horses seems to trample on
it with disdain; the days succeed days
with inexorable tedium. And Maud would
wish her grave still farther, farther down,
deeper yet within the earth; the dim noises
of its surface serve but to keep alive the
consciousness that she is dead.

Already there exist, in our Latin Amer-
ica, cities whose material grandeur and
apparent civilization place them in the first
rank; but one may fear lest a touch of
thought upon their exterior, so sumptu-
ous, may make the shining vessel ring
hollow within; lest our cities too— though
they had their Moreno,. their Rivadavia,
their Sarmiento, cities which gave initia-
tive to an immortal revolution that, like a
stone cast on water, spread the glory of
their heroes and the words of their trib-
unes in ever-widening circles over a vast
continent — may end like Tyre or Sidon,
or as Carthage ended.

ARIEL 135

It is your generation that must prevent
this; the youth which is of to-day, blood
and muscle and nerve of the future. I
speak to you, seeing in you those who are
destined to guide the others in coming
battles for a spiritual cause. The perse-
verance of your strength must be in you
as your certainty of victory. Be not afraid
to preach the evangel of refinement to the
Scythians, of intelligence to the Beotians,
of disinterest to the Pheenicians. It is
enough that thought insists on being, on
showing that it exists, as Diogenes proved
of movement, to make its spread irre-
sistible and its ultimate triumph secure.
Palm by palm, of its own impulse, it will
win what space it needs to establish its
kingdom among ali the other manifesta-
tions of life. In its physical organization
it will elevate and augment the hollow of¥
the very skull it works in, by its own ac-
tivity: the thinking races in their physio-
logical growth reveal this power of the

ve

‘ganization also will the thinker well know

136 ARIEL

e a
aap. q =
a "Pa =

unseen workman within. In his social or-

how to broaden the stage for his drama —
without the intervention of any power alien
to his own. But that conviction, which
should preserve from a discouragement
whose one utility is to make us rid our-
selves of the mean and mediocre, should
also keep us from the impatience which _
demands from time any alteration of its
majestic rhythm.

Every one who devotes himself to prop-
agate and preserve in contemporary Amer-
ica a disinterested ideal of the soul —art,
science, ethics, religious belief, a political
policy of ideals — should educate his belief _
in the persevering preparation for the fu-
ture. The past belonged entirely to the ©
sword arm; the present seems well-nigh
given over to the horny hand that clears —
away and builds; the future —a future that —
seems all the nearer as the thinking and —
willing of those who look forward to it —

ARIEL 137

grow more earnest — shall offer the sta-
bility, the scenario, the right atmosphere,
to make possible the higher evolution of
man’s soul. :

Can you not picture to yourselves the
America we others dream of? Hospitable
to things of the spirit, and not only to the
immigrant throngs; thoughtful, without
sacrificing its energy of action; serene and
strong and withal full of generous enthu-
siasm; resplendent with the charm of
morning calm like the smile of a waking
infant, yet with the light of awakening
thought. Think on her at least; the hon-
our of your future history depends on your
keeping constantly before your eyes the
vision of that America, radiant above the
realities of the present like the rose window
above the dark nave of a cathedral....
You may not be its founders ; but you will at
all events be its forerunners. In the glories
of the future there be also palms for such.
To prepare the advent of a new human

138 ARIEL

type, a new social unity, a profound stu-
dent of history, Edgar Quinet, has ob-
served that there always precedes, long be-

fore, a scattered group, premature, whose

réle in the evolution of society is like that
of the prophetic species in biology discov-
ered by Héer. The new type begins by
barely signalizing individualities; these
later get organized into varieties, and
finally these last, encountering a favouring
medium, attain the rank of a species ; then,
says Quinet, the “‘ group’? becomes the
multitude, and rules.

This is why your moral philosophy, in
labour or in combat, should be the reverse
of the Horatian carpe diem ; treat the pres-
ent moment only as the first step in the
stairway you are to tread, or as a breach in
the enemy wall you are to enter by. Ask
not at once for the final victory, but for
bettering your conditions for the conflict.
Thus will your energy have the greater
stimulus, since the dramatic interest is

ARIEL 139

greater in the continual renewal and ad-
vance, fit school to purify the forces of an
heroic generation, than in the serene and
Olympic attitude in which a golden age
might invest the acolytes of its glory. ‘‘ Itis
not the possession of good things, but their
attainment which gives to man delight
_ and glory in his power,”’ said Taine, speak-
ing of the happy times of the Renaissance.

Perhaps it were an audacious and in-
genuous hope to believe in so rapid and
fortunate an evolution, so efficacious an
employment of your powers, as to expect
that the span of your own generation will
suffice to bring in America the conditions
of intellectual life; from our now primitive
surroundings a true social interest; from
our present dead level a summit which
shall really be supreme. But where there
may not be entire transformation there
_ may be progress; and even though you
know that the first fruits of the soil you
labour may not be yours, they will if you

140 ARIEL

are generous and brave be a new stimulus
to action. The best work is that which is
realized without impatience for immediate
success, the most glorious effort that which
places the goal beyond the visible horizon,
and the purest abnegation that which re-
nounces for the present, not indeed the
laurel of men’s applause, but the bliss of
seeing one’s labour consummate and its
goal attained.

Antiquity had altars “‘for the unknown
Gods.’’ Consecrate a part of your soul to —
the unknown future. As societies develop, —
thought for the future becomes more and |

‘more a factor in their growth and an

inspiration to their labours.. From the
blind improvidence of the savage, who

only sees in it that time which shall bring
him to the setting. of the day’s sun and
conceives not how his lot in other days
may be determined by his present action,
up to our anxious preoccupation with the
future and provision for our posterity,

ARIEL +141

there is an immense distance; yet even
this may seem little enough some day.
We are only capable of progress in so far |
as we can adapt our actions every day to
the conditions of a more distant future, to
countries farther and farther away. Assur-
ance of our part in bringing about a work
which shall survive us, fruitful in times to
come, exalts our human dignity and gives
us triumph even over the limitations of our
nature. If unhappily humanity had to de-
spair definitely of the immortality of the
individual consciousness, the most reli-
gious sentiment that it could substitute
would be that which comes of the thought
that even after our dissolution into the
heart of things there would outlast, as part
of all human inheritance, the very best of
all that we had felt or thought, our deep-
est and our purest essence —just as the
beams of a long-extinguished star go on
indefinitely and still cheer us mortals, al-
beit with a melancholy light.

142 ARIEL

The future is, in the life of human so-
cieties, the one inspiring: thought. From
pious yeneration of the past and the cult
of tradition, on the one hand, and, on the
other, a daring impulse toward the future,
comes the noble force which, uplifting the
common thought above the present limi-
tations, imparts to its collective agitations
and sentiments a sense for some ideal.
Men and peoples work under the inspira-
tion of ideas, as the beasts by instinct; and
that society which labours and struggles,
even unconsciously, to impose an idea
upon actualities, acts as does the bird
who, building its nest at the prompting of
some inner imagination, obeys at once an
unconscious memory of the past and a
mysterious presentiment of the future.

A preoccupation for the ulterior destiny
of our life, by eliminating any suggestion
of self-interest, purifies and tranquillizes
it and also ennobles; and it is a proud

honour of this century that the impelling —

a

ARIEL’ 143

force of this thought for the future, this
sense of what is due the dignity of a ra-
tional being, should have shown itself so
clearly. Even in the depths-of the most
utter pessimism, in the bosom of that bit-
ter metaphysic which brought from the
East the love of dissolution and nonentity,
even Hartmann, the apostle for the return
to the Unconscious, has preached, and
with some appearance of logic, the austere
duty of going on with the work of im-
provement, labouring for the good of the
future, so that human effort, aiding evo-
lution, may bring about a more rapid im-
pulse to the final end — which is the ter-
mination of all sorrow, and likewise of all
life.

But not, as did Hartmann, in the name
of death, but in that of life and hope do I ask
of you a portion of your soul for the labour
_ for the future ; and it is to ask this of you
that I have sought inspiration in the gentle
and lovely image of my Ariel. ‘The bounti-

144 ARIEL

ful Spirit whom Shakespeare hit upon to
clothe with so high a symbolism, perhaps
with that divine unconsciousness of all it
meant which is common to great geniuses,
shows clearly, even in this statuette, its
ideal significance, admirably expressed in
the sculptor’s lines. Ariel is reason, and
the higher truth. Ariel is that sublime sen-

| timent of the perfectibility of man through

\ whose virtue human clay is magnified and

transformed in the realm of things for each
one who lives by his light — even that mis-
erable clay of which Ahriman spoke to
Manfred. . . . Ariel is, to nature, that
crowning of its work which ends the as-
cending process of organic life with the call
of the spirit. Ariel triumphant signifies
ideality and order in life, noble inspiration
in thought, unselfishness in conduct, high
taste in art, heroism of action, delicacy and
refinement in manners and usages. He is
the eponymous hero in the épopée of man,
the immortal protagonist, since first his

ARIEL — 145

presence inspired the feeble struggles ‘of
reason in primitive man, when he first
knitted his brow in the effort to shape the
flint, or to scratch rude drawings on a rein-
deer’s bones ; since first with his arms he
fanned the sacred fire which the ancient
Aryan, progenitor of the peoples we call
civilized, lit, by what mystery we know
not, on the banks of the Ganges, and forged
from the divine flame the sceptre of man’s
mastery. Ariel accompanies him still, and
- onward, breeding races ever higher, until
at the end he hovers radiant above those
souls which have over-passed the natural
limit of humanity ; the same for Plato on
the Sunium Promontory as for Francis of
Assisi on the solitude of the Albern Mont.
‘His invincible power has as its impulse
every uplifting moment of a human life.
Though overcome a thousand and one
times by the untamable rebellion of Caliban,
proscribed by the victorious barbarian,
smothered in the clouds of battle, his

146 ARIEL

bright wings spotted by trailing in ‘‘the
eternal dunghill of Job,’’ Ariel ever rises
again, immortally renews his beauty and
his youth. Ariel runs nimbly as at the call
of Prospero to all who really care for him
and seek to find him. His kindly power goes
even out at times to those who would deny
him. He guides the blind forces of evil and
ignorance often to aid, and unwittingly, in
works of good. He crosses human history
_ with a song, as in the “‘ Tempest, ’’ to in-
spire those who labour and those who fight
until he brings about the fulfilment of that
divine plan to them unknown — and he is
permitted, as in Shakespeare’s play, to
‘snap his bonds in twain and soar forever
into his circle of diviner light.

And more than for these words of mine
I would have you ever remember tenderly
this little figure of Ariel. I would that the
image, light and graceful, of this bronze,
impress itself upon your inmost spirit. . . .
Once I saw, in a museum, an old coin;

ARIEL 147

worn and effaced I could still read its de-
vice, in the thin gold, the one word Espe-
ranza. I pondered on the influence that
simple inscription might have ‘had on the
many generations through whose hands
the coin had passed ; how many fainting
spirits it had cheered, how many generous
impulses it had fostered, how many des-
perate resolutions it had prevented. So
may the figure of this bronze, graven in
your hearts, fulfil in your lives this invis-
ible yet determining part. In dark hours
of discouragement may it rekindle in your
conscience the warmth of the ideal, return
to your hearts the glow of a perishing hope.
And Ariel, first enthroned behind the bas-
tion of your inner life, may sally thence to
the attack and conquering of other souls.
I see the bright spirit smiling back upon
you in future times, even though your own
still works in shadow. I have faith in your
will and in your strength, even more in
those to whom you shall transfer your life,

148 ARIEL

transmit your work. I dream in rapture of
that day when realities shall convince the
world that the Cordillera which soars above
the continent of the Americas has been
carved to be the pedestal of this statue,
the altar of the cult of Ariel.

So spoke Prospero. The youths de-
parted, after a filial grasping of the Mas-
ter’s hand. Of his sweet words there lin-
gered an echo in each one’s mind as when
a finger is drawn across a musical glass.
It was the last hour of eve. A ray of the
dying sun fell through the shadowed hall, —
and touching the front of. bronze seemed
almost to animate the face 6f the figure with
the unquiet spark « of life ; and the ray pro-
longed itself as if the genius imprisoned in
the bronze were sending his last look to-
- ward the young men going away....
For a long time they walked in silence.
Guarded by their common absorption each
soul could feel that fine distilling of medi-

ARIEL 149

tation that falls on thought like quiet dew
on the wool of sleeping lambs. When the
rough contact of the street crowds roused
them, it was already night ; a serene, soft
night ofsummer. The grace and calm that
dropped from its ebon urn over the land
rose above the prosy realities of the things
of men; only their presence brought the
youths again back to earth. A soft breeze
charged the air with a languid, delicious
sense of abandon, like the trembling of the
cup in a Bacchante’s hand. The darkness
in the heavens was not of black, but rather
of a deep azure that seemed expressive of a
thoughtful calm. Enamelled in it the great
stars blazed amid their infinite company:
Aldebaran, arrayed in purple light ; Sirius,
like the hollow of a silver chalice turned
toward the world ; the Cross, whose arms
are open over our America as if to guard
and hold its final hope... .

And then it was that after a prolonged
silence the youngest of the group — they

150 ARIEL

called him ‘‘Enjolrdés’’ because of his
ardent thought — spoke, pointing out first —
the idle movement of the human herd and
then the radiant beauty of the skies: _
“‘See . . . while the crowd goes by, it
never looks up to the heavens: yet they
look down upon the multitude . . . some-
thing descends upon the indifferent mass
. . . the vibration of the stars reminds me

of the waving arms of a sower, sowing
seed att |

THE END

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